geekosystem

So, you think you know the theme song to hit 90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? Well, you've probably got a point -- after all, it's one of the most ubiquitous TV themes of the last several decades, and you'd be hard-pressed to have grown up in the last 20 years and not at least be able to fake knowing the tune. The musicians of CDZA, though, are offering up some new interpretations of the theme through the magic of Google Translate, though, parsing the lyrics into languages like Mandarin Chinese and Hindi, then translating it back into English in a rather entertaining manner. You can get a load of the results in the video below and marvel at how few languages have a serviceable translation for the phrase "chillin' out, maxxin', relaxin' all cool." Truly, the English language is a glorious thing.

In its latest update, Google Translate for Android went Goggles, and brought us the ability to translate words from photos. Which makes perfect sense, because if you can't read it, odds are you probably can't type it. Here's how you use it.

Previously, we've learned that one can make Google Translate beatbox. Now, a Taiwanese video manages use Google Translate in such a way that it sings a song about Google Translate. The video quickly rose to the top of the Taiwanese YouTube charts, racking up over half a million views and becoming one of the most viewed videos of the past week over in Taiwan. It's fun when people do fun things with things that aren't actually meant to be fun.

(Google Blog via MetaFilter)

Not sure if this falls in the category of Easter Egg or clever manipulation, but either way, there go our afternoons: Redditor harrichr has devised a scheme for turning Google Translate into a makeshift beatbox machine.

1) Go to [1] Google Translate 2) Set the translator to translate German to German 3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch 4) Click "listen" 5) Be amazed :)

For the lazy, just click this link and it'll be done for you. There's nothing magical about this particular sequence, and there's tons of room for experimentation:

Gotta love Google for undertaking geeky projects with little commercial value for their own sakes: The company announced that Google Translate will now work for Latin. Appropriately, the post by "Jakob Uszkoreit, Ingeniarius Programmandi" was written entirely in Latin. Aside from being a nifty curiosity that will probably drive high school Latin teachers with lazy students crazy, there are two things worth noting about this.

Google Translate is by no means a perfect translation service -- you're still going to have to invest in those language classes if you want to be able to fluently communicate with speakers of foreign tongues -- but if you remember the online wasteland that preceded it, you'll know it's pretty darn good at conveying the gist of what you're trying to express. Also: That 'detect language' feature saves you the hassle of fiddling with lots of dropdown menus. So how does it do it?

For those of you who always run into problems when trying to read ancient Ugaritic writing used in the lost city of Ugarit, behold! Scientists have used a computer program to translate the 3,000 year old language --first discovered by French archaeologists in 1920, yet only deciphered twelve years later--in mere hours, the Daily Mail reports.

"Traditionally, decipherment has been viewed as a sort of scholarly detective game, and computers weren't thought to be of much use," said research head Regina Barzilay. "Our aim is to bring to bear the full power of modern machine learning and statistics to this problem."

In a poll of over 300 Japanese women, half of them felt that they couldn't compete with fake females.

When asked whether they thought they could win against a 2D game character their boyfriend was besotted with, 53% thought they had “no chance.”