Polly Glotto
I came across a very useful online translation site today - Polly Glotto. It not only translates text between ten different languages (Chinese, English, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish), but also uses text-to-speech technology to speak the translations. The translations it produces aren’t always perfect, but they are generally quite good, and most of the voices sound fairly natural as well.
Here’s a example of the phrase ‘Hello, I am Polly Glotto’ in French.
Polly on 29 Sep 2006 at 9:07 pm #
Fantastic!:D Too bad there’s nothing for Russian :(. тем не менее, I still have plenty of use for this site.
I didn’t think they had anything like this, yet. I use Babel fish and Worldlingo extensively for MT, but they don’t offer voice. This is a wonderful tool! I’ve always wished for something that would “speak” whatever I’m reading so that I could hear it as it really sounds. I just hope it’s more or less correct.
Paul on 02 Oct 2006 at 8:13 pm #
Great idea! I’m not planning to use it on a website yet though. I’m not sure that it will say what I want. I notice that PollyGlotto often misses the first few letters of the translation - is it just me, or is there a bug? I also tried translating some phrases from English to another language and back again, both on PollyGlotto and BabelFish - here’s some of what I got for the traditional English greeting “How do you do?”:
German - “How?”
Greek - “What you make?”
Japanese - “How it does?”
and my favourite:
Italian - “How fairies?”