Assignment #1: Google Translate

          Google is one of the most popular websites. Anyone who serves the internet knows Google and most of them use some services of Google. There are so many interesting services provided for visitors and all of them are free! Besides, Google always develops new services and the new interesting one is Google Translate.

          Google Translate is a service for visitors to translate the language of sentences, websites, or search results. To go to Google Translate, when you are at the home page of Google, click ‘more’ at the top menu bar. Then it will show the drop down menu, click ‘even more’. Next, the page will change to ‘more Google product’ and you will see ‘Translate’ in the section of ‘communicate, show & share’. It is in the center of the right column of the page, you just click it, and it will bring you to Google Translate. Or just click to ‘http://translate.google.com’.

          The first page of Google Translate shows the part of text and website translation. You will see a top menu bar for choosing other services of Google Translate, which consists of text and web, translated search, dictionary, and tools. Under the menu is a part of text translation. There is a text box for user to enter the sentences or words. Below the text box are three buttons. The first button is the button for choosing the original language that should be the same as the language of the sentence in the text box. The center button is the button for choosing the target language. The last button is the submit button, which represents as ‘translate’. Once you click a translate button, the result will show in the right of the text box in your target language. Another part of this page is website translation that shows under the part of text translation. In this part, they provide a text field for users to enter the URL of the website that they want to translate. Under the text field, there are three buttons, which are the same with the text translation part, original language, target language, and translate button. To use website translation is also easy; you just type the URL of the website in the text field. Next, choose an original language (choose the language of that website) and target language, and then click ‘translate’. The page will change to the website that you entered and it is translated to your target language. These two parts are easy to use and are very efficient.

          Now, let me show you something more advance, ‘Translated search’. In general, when we use a search engine, the results will show only in the same language of the keyword that we entered. Nevertheless, Google Translate helps you find more results by letting you search your keyword in other language. For example, your keyword is ‘cat’ and you want to find information from a Spanish website, you just type the keyword ‘cat’, and then select your language as ‘English’ and choose a search page language as ‘Spanish’. Google translate will search a ‘cat’ in a Spanish website and show the result in ‘English’. In fact, it translates ‘cat’ into Spanish, gato, and then search the word ‘gato’. In the end, it will translate the result’s website into English and shows the results to you. Anyway, when you go into this page, you will see a text field for type the keyword. Below the keyword text field is the drop down menu of your language and search page language. In the third line, there is a search button. The results show under the search button, it looks similar to normal Google search but there are two columns of results. The left column is the results that are already translated to your language and the right column is the original website.

          Moreover, Google Translate provides dictionary service for visitors to search for a definitions and related words. In the dictionary, you can choose the original and target language as well. Using this dictionary is very easy in just three steps. Firstly, choose the dictionary, such as English to Spanish dictionary. Secondly, type the keyword in the text field. Lastly, click ‘search dictionary’, and then the results will show below.