Friday, 31 August 2007
Speaking in more languages
Many Google products (Google.com, Blogger, Google Earth, and others) currently support more than 170 languages, from Abhazian to Zulu. Translations into most of these languages are done by volunteers from around the world who are eager to help people view and search the web in their own native language. To facilitate how we go about getting these languages, we created a volunteer translation program: Google In Your Language.
Anybody can sign up as a volunteer translator by visiting the Language Tools page and then clicking on the Google in Your Language link. After verification, you'll be offered a list of products to translate, including the main search site, Gmail, iGoogle, Google Maps, and many others
Although the amount of translation for each project is not overwhelming, it usually takes weeks for an individual volunteer to finish translating one site. Once a reasonable percentage of translations for Google pages in a given language is submitted, we'll add your language to production and, after a bit of time, you'll be able to see them in yet another language.
Some "volunteer" languages are well represented and are nearly finished being translated, i.e. Armenian, Estonian, Slovenian are 95% complete; even Latin has 70% of its translations done. Representatives of other languages are not as active, i.e. Abhazian has been available for several years, but so far we don't have enough translations completed to release it into production. Tibetan, Inupak, Inuktikut, Wolof, Zhuang all have less than 10% of their content translated. Interestingly, each of those has more speakers than Faroese, which has 74% of texts translated.
Recently we have added a bunch of new languages to the Google In Your Language program, including Navajo, Filipino, several Russian Federation languages (Avaric, Chechen, Chuvash, Komi), and some African languages (Akan, Bambara, Gikuyu, Kongo, Ndebele, Ndongo, Nyanja, Venda). Our hope is to attract even more volunteers to participate in this program so that Google can speak all the world's languages one day.
Google Desktop for the Mac in 9 more languages
In April we launched Google Desktop for the Mac to further our goal of delivering great products on the Mac and making them universally available on all platforms. A big thanks to all of you for using Desktop for the Mac, and for sharing your feedback. Today we're tackling the second part of that "universal" goal: now Google Desktop for the Mac is available in 9 more languages: Chinese Simplified and Traditional, Dutch, UK English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. There's more on this on the Desktop for Mac site.
We look forward to lots more of you trying it and sending us feedback from all over, and in different languages. We hope you like it, and encourage you to watch for more updates from our Google Mac team.
Wednesday, 29 August 2007
Supporting GrandCentral's Project CARE
For homeless people and others in need, not having a stable phone number can be crippling: you need one to follow up on medical appointments, keep in touch with friends and loved ones, and hear back from prospective employers.
When we acquired GrandCentral Communications last month, we were pleased to embrace their Project CARE initiative, which provides a permanent local phone number and unlimited voicemail service to people who need a way to stay connected.
GrandCentral has been operating Project CARE ("Communications and Respect for Everybody") since April 2006, and with the help of more than 20 community outreach partners has provided more than 5,000 phone numbers and served close to 100,000 voicemail messages to homeless and needy people in the Bay Area. Someone calling a number from Project CARE will have the same experience as someone calling a standard phone number, and voicemail messages can be stored as long as they're needed.
A big part of Project CARE has been GrandCentral's participation in San Francisco's Project Homeless Connect events. Every other month, these gatherings bring service providers like GrandCentral together with volunteers at an all-day fair to provide services to the homeless. In fact, there's an event today, starting at 8:30 AM (PDT) at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. If you're in San Francisco, please stop by our booth or even volunteer.