Google adds Esperanto as its 64th machine translatable language

Esperanto isn't just something Microsoft uses to tease Google for abandoning video codecs, it's a legitimate, manufactured language. Created in the late 1800's by Dr. Ludwig L. Zamenhof, Esperanto was designed to be an easy to learn language that would help folks from all over the world understand each other. Seeing as how Google Translate shares similar goals, the Mountain View firm felt Zamenhof's homemade tongue would be the perfect fit for its machine translation service. Despite a rather small sample size of pre-existing translated material to feed the Google language machine, the firm says Google Translate handled Esperanto surprisingly well -- partially crediting the language's learner friendly construction for the service's success. Sure, it may not be the most useful addition Google Translate's ever seen, but hey, it gets us one step closer to watching cult classics like Incubus without the subtitles. What's that, you haven't heard of William Shatner's pre-Star Trek, all Esperanto romp? Crack open your machine translator and head past the break, then.

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Google adds Esperanto as its 64th machine translatable language originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Comments

[Patbillchapman]

If you're interested in Esperanto, take a look at http://www.lernu.net

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1004522862]

Good to see the progress of Esperanto.

During a short period of 125 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of, Skype, Firefox, Ubuntu and Facebook and Google translate recently added to its prestigious list of 64 languages.

Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet. Financier George Soros learnt Esperanto as a child.

Esperanto is a living language - see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670

Their online course http://www.lernu.net has 125 000 hits per day and Esperanto Wikipedia enjoys 400 000 hits per day. That can't be bad :)