Google adds Gaeilge to Translation tools

national | sci-tech | other press Wednesday September 02, 2009 12:39 by über coinín

Google has added Irish Gaeilge, Yidish, Welsh, Belarussian, Macedonian, Afrikaans, Swahili, Mali and Icelandic to the suite of languages which its free online translation tool supports.

The last upgrade to the list which currently offers 51 languages was the inclusion of Persian or Farsi, an update which we remember occured during the "green revolution" and allowed us all to follow events in Iran without paying to much attention to tweeting twits based in US lobby offices.

This great news now means we will be able to follow similar events as they happen in Ireland without having to study Gaeilge, understand Hector or even own a copy of the Bunreacht.

Alas, there is a downside to this new step forward in global social networking and inter-comprehension. Google has not so far added these langauges to its Google Friend Connect, Google Talk, Gmail or Google Docs services.

So you won't be able to hook up with Yiddish and Afrikaan speakers at the same time and send them emoticons without risking being offensive.

It might mean that in future someone might volunteer to translate the Belarus Indymedia feature articles into Gaeilge on a regular basis so that every time we users of IMC Ireland go to the page that displays features selected by other IMC groups in the global network we don't see gibberish from Belarus but instead cupla focail .

It also means that by a mere process of cut & pasting, those of us who can't understand the Irish language articles or comments on this website can go to Google and probably get some garbled version of what was actually written.

Tweedy Gaeilgoirs beware. Your days of taking the piss out of us monolinguists are at an end. We can all be an über coinín anois.