Plant Blog

Google have recently released a new API for working with different languages.

The 2 main functions are Language Detection and Translation.

With Language detection, a string of text is fed into the API, and the result is the language that the text is written. It even sends back a percentage value illustrating how accurate the results are. This is a nice feature, knowing that the same words can and do exist in multiple languages.

The translation feature simply takes a string in one of the supported languages and converts in to another language of your choosing.

The applications of this API could be quite intruiging. Educational, recreational and instructional uses come immediately to mind, so it will be interesting to see what people do with it. Maybe some language schools could have some fun with it in their advertising campaigns? It’s easy to imagine a banner ad or microsite challenging potential students to test their level of knowledge of a particular language as a way of recruiting new schools. Perhaps even a as an automated tool to determine what class level a given student should be put in.

Sadly, Danish is not currently one of the supported languages, while Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish are missing also, meaning those of us working on localized versions of sites in Scandinavia are out of luck for now. Hopefully as the usage and development of the tools increase, so will the list of supported languages and thus possibilities.

Source: Google Ajax Search API Blog