The Foreigner's Guide to Slovakia

Have you ever been surfing the Web and come across a site in another language than your own, and wanted to understand what it was saying? Google provides an online service that can translate pieces of text or even whole Web pages. It’s called Google Translate. At first the service proved translation between a handful of languages such as German, French, Spanish, and English, but over the years, they’ve applied their machine-learning algorithm to other languages. Just in this past week or so, Google has added Slovak to its translation service.

This means that it is now possible to translate Slovak text and Websites to English and vice versa. Take a look at the Google Translate page, with a small piece of translated text:

Ok, so the translations aren’t perfect. That’s fine with me. They don’t need to be perfect, just good enough for a reader to get the gist of what the text is about. There is, however, a “Suggest a better translation” feature at the base of the translated text where a reader can add an improved translation. Google uses this information to improve the quality of machine translations by mining more data.

Here’s an example of an article in Slovak from the SME newspaper Website with the translated version in English below it. See what you think:

When your page translates, if you mouse over a sentence, a bubble pops up displaying the original sentence. For those who are studying Slovak, this is a nice feature for examining sentence structure and vocabulary. Here’s an example:

Google Translate can be a powerful tool for the person who wants to know what’s the latest headlines and stories being written about in Slovakia. It can also be used as a learning tool, allowing a reader to be able to compare sentences or articles for learning the language.

Just as a test I thought of pasting a Slovak recipe in the translator to see what I could get.

Not bad. Food words were probably the first set of vocabulary I learned in Slovak because I like to cook and bake. Google Translate could be a great way to increase familiarity of a particular interest of yours. The sky is the limit with something like this.

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