October 10, 2005
Et Tu, Fran’ais?
This summer we debuted a translated search tool into the German market which gave German users access to the huge francophone and anglophone sections of the web, and to all the documents and web sites therein.
But why should Germany have all the fun? Now, we have expanded the Search Translator beta service in three important ways:
- We’ve introduced the translated search into France, where the queries are translated from French into English, German, Italian, and Spanish. Now French users looking for information about recipes with jalape’o peppers (’recette jalepeno“) can find over 1.6 million pages with the translated search, compared to fewer than 900 without.
- Translated search is now in Asia too: in Japan, with queries translated into English, Korean, and simplified Chinese, and in Taiwan, with traditional Chinese queries translated into simplified Chinese.
- We are especially excited about the Taiwan launch, as this gives users access to eight times more pages for their searches, and uses the proprietary Yahoo! Search Translation technology for the translation between simplified and traditional Chinese. Our technology is more accurate than any commercial system we tested! Taiwanese users looking up Peking University with the traditional Chinese orthography (’北京大學‘) can now gain access to the most relevant pages, most of which are in simplified Chinese.
- We’ve expanded the search function to include image and video search for the French and German markets. A German search for images of LEGO creations (’LEGO Kreation‘) yields one single, lonely image normally, but with the translation feature a whopping 1.1 million more pictures show up!
Let us know what you think of the product, and how it could be improved or expanded. All feedback, positive and negative, is appreciated!
–Raymond Flournoy
Linguistic Product Manager
Yahoo! Search
Hi there,
Just tried searching for the french translation of my blog (”Software Only”) as “Logiciel Seulement”), and it is there (http://fr.search.yahoo.com/search?p=logiciel+seulement&prssweb=Rechercher&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&fl=0&vc=&x=wrt&ybs=1).
But clicking on the link leads to an error of the translation tool, that indicates that it can’t find the URL.
Hope this helps!
The title should be “Es tu Français?” ;-)
This is a good start but once you can fix translation glitch like “NW 20th Place” in something else that “Endroit de Nanowatt 20èmes”, then I”l be glad
Yahoo does not do the translation, they use some software by systran (so does google and everyone else.)
I simply search my full name.
http://fr.search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=guillaume+belfiore&ybs=1
Now the third result translate my Yahoo Launchcast radio station butit should be read : la station DE Guillaume belfiore ( com’on aren’t I unique !!!)
When is Yahoo planning to start the Turkish Portal. MSN already has it, Google has the search and Ads in Turkish. Studies are showing that there are 7.5 Million internet users are in Turkey (this number is almost as large as the population of some European countries and not to mention all the Turkish speaking former USSR countries) and the internet is booming. People are becoming more comfortable with online shopping and companies are now willing to spend money on Online Ads. Being one of the industry
leaders, Yahoo should seriously consider building the portal in Turkish as well as giving some Turkish capability to the current products. If you need more info to justify this idea you can always reach me. I would be more than happy to assist you.
Vural Cifci
Thanks for the feedback!
> But clicking on the link leads to an error of the translation tool, …
There are a number of reasons that certain pages cause the translation engine to conk out, including length, mixed encoding, and certain control characters. We are investigating your page in particular, Jeff, and I’ll try to send you an explanation off-line when we come up with a satisfactory answer.
> The title should be “Es tu Français?” ;-)
Nope, it’s correct as “Et Tu, Français?”. This is an (admittedly bad) pun on the quote from Julius Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?” (”And you, Brutus?”).
> This is a good start but once you can fix translation glitch …
Thanks for the compliment, and yes, we are always striving for better translation quality. As An noted, we are using licensed technology, so our hands are tied to a certain extent, but we are always happy to gather feedback to help us improve what we can. Thanks, Riad!
Guillaume, your example also falls into this category, but until we can clone you, I’ll look into why your translation comes out pluralized.
> Yahoo should seriously consider building the portal in Turkish …
This is a good suggestion, Vural, and I’ll pass it on to those who make the decisions about our market expansions. In the short-term, we on the translation side are looking into machine translation for less-common languages. I would personally *love* to offer Turkish translation, but no promises yet.
Thanks for all the feedback!
–Raymond Flournoy
Linguistic Product Manager
Yahoo! Search
> The title should be “Es tu Français?” ;-)
Nope, it’s correct as “Et Tu, Français?”. This is an (admittedly bad) pun on the quote from Julius Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?” (”And you, Brutus?”).
:D I love it, nice one (tu quoque fili), nothing beats a bit of culture in this technological world…
PS: in that case it should be “Et tu” but don’t worry, it is a Great title!
> Nope, it’s correct as “Et Tu, Français?”. This is an (admittedly bad) pun on the quote from Julius Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?” (”And you, Brutus?”)
It’s definitly not correct (trust me, i’m French !).
“Es-tu français ?” would mean “Are you French?”
“Et toi, français ?” would mean “And you, French?”
And according to french grammar, “français” should be in lowercase because it’s an adjective (only proper nouns start by a capital letter) and there should be a space between the last word and the question mark, unlike in English.
“Et tu, Brute ?” is Latin, we would translate it “Et toi, Brutus ?” (or in this context “Même toi, Brutus ?” = “Even you, Brutus?”) because there isn’t anymore declension in French.
Hope it helps :)
Hoo boy. You know, the best jokes are the ones that you have to explain in excruciating detail. ;^)
The quote is Latin, not French, so that’s why it is “et tu” and not “es-tu” or “et toi”. I just liked the rhyming substitution of “français” for “Brute.” The capitals are because it is a title, although that’s admittedly an English convention. I’m not sure how our Latin forebears titled their blog posts. ;^)
OK, at this point I’ll declare the blog title a failure, and will not give up my day job for the life of a comedy writer. But on the up side, we’re seeing really good sampling of the translation tool and getting some good feedback from users. Thanks everyone!
question from a newbie: how do we submit our blog for your blog search engine?
“This is a good suggestion, Vural, and I’ll pass it on to those who make the decisions about our market expansions. In the short-term, we on the translation side are looking into machine translation for less-common languages. I would personally *love* to offer Turkish translation, but no promises yet.”
Just to check
http://www.msn.com.tr
http://www.google.com.tr
If you want to start a open content project and more market data I can provide it. Even though I live in Chicago, I want to expand the Turkish internet market as much as I can. I ould appreciate if you could send me any updates in the future regarding a project in
turkish. Because I really would like to be involved.
Thanks,
Vural Cifci
http://www.searchenginepapers.com
I need it in Russian. And I would like to be able to discuss the meanings with other interested.
I would like to be able to discuss the translations with other interested.
http://www.all-translations.com