Fun With Google Translate

Translation tools, while useful, aren’t always what you would call “fun to play around with.” But that’s not entirely accurate, as people have found a couple of ways to mess ar...
Fun With Google Translate
Written by Josh Wolford
  • Translation tools, while useful, aren’t always what you would call “fun to play around with.” But that’s not entirely accurate, as people have found a couple of ways to mess around with the audio language translation to make it a bit more…musical.

    Over on the Google Blog, they give us a couple examples of the musicality of their translate application.

    When we built Google Translate we thought it was a cool tool, but we have to admit we had fairly straightforward ideas about what it would be useful for (lowering language barriers and making more web content available to people around the world). As with many inventions, though, it turns out people have found uses for the tool that we never imagined. Recently, two clever Translate trends caught our eye—perhaps one of them will inspire you to come up with a fun Translate trick of your own.

    Oh, Google – you thought people would use applications for their intended purpose…bwahaha.

    First up, watch as the English to German translation tool is used to create a simply beatbox. If you want to go to Google translate now and try it yourself, just enter a bunch of p’s, v’s, k’s and other hard consonants and the little blue icon will actually change from “listen” to “beatbox.”

    Google didn’t put this one on the blog, but I like it:

    In Taiwan, the Google Translate music trend has really caught fire. Someone uploaded a video of Chinese phrases being translated, and set to music. This video was a top YouTube trend, garnering half a million views a couple weeks ago. It was one of the most viewed videos in Taiwan:

    And then there’s this…whatever this may be:

    She sure didn’t get to 10 million followers with stuff like that.

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