Google Translate has been around for some time. you paste in a block of text or a URL, set the source and target languages and off it goes, translating.
Aside from the omnipresent Spanish, German, and French translations, Google had been steadily adding other languages to its list, save one, Persian (known as Farsi in Persian language,) until now.
It's a well-known fact that Iranians are one of the most active Internet users in the world, certainly far and above the others in Middle East. That is more noteworthy given the censorship and restrictions by the government. I wonder what the activity level would be if people are given complete freedom of expression. Then again, it may just be the political situation that has given rise to the Internet-savvy generation who has been pushed into harnessing technology for its causes, but I digress.
It seems that the interest surrounding the post-election turmoil in Iran finally pushed Google into adding Persian to the list of their languages. They should have done it a long time ago, but better late than never.
The Persian translation page is in alpha mode (read, crude), but it's a good start. Being fluent in Persian, I tried the translator for a number of sites and text-passages, and I give it a barely passing grade translating to and from English. In most cases it was coherent enough to get the main concepts across. Of course, translation technologies as a whole still have a long way to go, and they may never reach human proficiency.
As an example, this Persian sentence:
?? ???? ????? ????? ?? ??? ???? ? ??? ???? ???? ?? ??????? ???? ????? ????? ??? ?? ?? ???? ????? ?? ???? ??? ????? 🙂
is translated from:
With Google translating Persian now, you no longer need to call your Persian friends to translate Iranian government propaganda for you 🙂
Not exactly a perfect translation.
Here's the Persian translation of this blog's home page.
google,translation,google translate,persian,farsi,iran,language translation
Give a few Sats