Google Translate Help

Google Translate is a free automatic translator. It works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead. Google Translate currently supports translation between any of these 57 languages:

Translation to and from Alpha languages may not work as well as other languages, as these systems are still in early stages of development. Learn more about the inner workings of Google Translate.

Translate text instantly

To translate words and phrases, simply select your translation languages and start typing. The translation result should appear instantly as you type, without you having to click a single button. Note that you'll need Javascript enabled to take advantage of our instant translation feature. You can always click the Translate button to trigger a translation.

When you translate a single word, you may see a simple dictionary at the bottom indicating parts of speech and possible word variations. For most language pairs, you'll also see a View Detailed Dictionary link. This will display a more detailed Google Dictionary page with example sentences, images, and more.

If you aren't sure what language you're attempting to translate, the "Detect language option" can figure this out for you. The accuracy of the automatic language detection increases with the amount of text entered.

Read and listen to your translation

If you're trying to translate to a non-Roman script, you'll see a Read phonetically link next to the translation. Clicking this link will spell out the translation in Roman(Latin) characters. This feature is currently available for Armenian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Georgian, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Maltese, Russian, Serbian, Thai and Ukrainian.

For many languages, you may see also a speaker button near the translated text. Click this icon to hear a machine-generated spoken version of your translation. This feature is currently available for English, French, German, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Italian and Spanish.

An experimental text-to-speech system (TTS) is available for several other languages, powered by the eSpeak open-source speech synthesizer: Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh. You may notice significant differences in speech quality between the experimental languages and the other available languages.

Input text phonetically

Many languages are difficult to type if you don't own a special layout keyboard for that script. When translating from Russian, Hindi, Serbian, Greek, Arabic, Persian or Urdu, you'll see an "Allow phonetic typing" checkbox near the input area. This feature allows you to type these languages as they sound in English - for example, "aap" for "आप" in Hindi. When you press space, the word will be converted to Hindi script, and its translation will be displayed below. The phonetic typing feature is on by default; uncheck the checkbox to turn it off, when you want to input Roman characters. Phonetic typing does not interfere if you are using a native-layout keyboard for such languages.

If you still have questions about Google Translate and want to learn more, or would like to give us your feedback, please see the Google Translate discussion group.

Translate entire webpages

Translate an entire web page directly from Google Translate, simply by entering its address (e.g. "www.google.com") into the input box and clicking Translate.

If you hover your mouse over the translated text, the original text for the highlighted segment is displayed in an info bubble just above the translated text. To see all of the original text of the page, click the View: Original radio button in the top frame of the translated page. Now, when you hover your mouse over the original text, the automatic translation for the highlighted segment is displayed in an info bubble.

Translate documents from your computer

Google Translate also provides an easy way to translate whole documents, without the need for copying and pasting large blocks of text. Simply click the translate a document link and submit your file as a PDF, TXT, DOC, PPT, XLS or RTF. Please note that some of your original formatting may not be preserved.

If you need to create and translate content in other languages and would like to improve your efficiency and accuracy using translation tools like automatic translation, translation search and glossaries, use the Translator Toolkit. This allows you to translate and edit your documents online, and collaborate with others. Learn more about the Translator Toolkit

Contribute a better translation

We're constantly working to improve the quality of our translations. Even today's most sophisticated software, however, doesn't approach the fluency of a native speaker or possess the skill of a professional translator. Automatic translation is very difficult, as the meaning of words depends on the context in which they're used. While we are working on the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer human quality translations. In the meantime, we hope you find the service we provide useful for most purposes. If, while using Google Translate, you notice that our translation could be better, hover your cursor over the translated term and click Contribute a better translation to suggest improvements.

Help us support new languages

We're also working to support other languages and will introduce them as soon as the automatic translation meets our standards. It's difficult to project how long this will take, as the problem is complex and each language presents its own unique challenges. In order to develop new languages and improve the quality of existing languages, we need large amounts of bilingual texts. You can help by using Translator Toolkit for translating or uploading your translation memories into Translator Toolkit.

Sometimes the best results for your search query may not be in your language. Translated Search is your window into the multilingual web. This feature of Google Search allows you to type queries in your own language and view results from around the world translated back to your language, all powered by Google Translate.

To search websites in other languages, click Language Tools below the search box on google.com then:

1. Type one or more search terms into the search box.
2. Select the language of your search term in the "My language" dropdown.
3. Select the "Specific languages" radio button in the "Search pages written in" section
4. Select the language, or languages, of the websites you'd like to search.
5. Hit the Enter key or click the Translate and Search button.

Google translates your search term and performs a search using the translated terms. The search results are then translated back into the language you selected in the "My language" dropdown. Click a translated result and you'll be taken to an automatically translated version of the page.

Edit the translated search term

If you know the translation of your search term isn't quite right, just click Edit next to the translated query on the search results page to edit it. Then press Enter or click the search button to search using the corrected search term.

Advanced search operators

The site: and filetype: advanced search operators are currently supported. You can stop a search term from being translated by putting a + sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the + sign.)

The Google Translate Web Element allows you to instantly make your website available in other languages. After you enable the Element on your webpage, visitors to your webpage will be offered the option to view a translated version of your website.

Visitors whose web browser language is different from the that of your website will see a banner at the top of the page prompting them for translation. Other users can, if they choose, trigger translation from a dropdown menu on your page with a list of supported languages. When a visitor translates a page, the Web Element sends the text of the web page to Google Translate and displays the translated text without reloading or redirecting visitors from the page. If the visitor clicks on a link in the translated page and the linked web page also has the Element embedded in it, the linked web page will also be automatically translated for the them, allowing them to seamlessly browse through your website in their language.

To create a link that automatically translates your Translate Web Element-enabled page without prompting your users, use the parameter #googtrans(en|TARGET_LANG_CODE). For example, the link http://translate.google.com/support/#googtrans(en|fr) automatically translates the page http://translate.google.com/support/ into French.

Visit the Element setup wizard and follow these simple steps:

1. Select the language in the language drop-down that your web page is written in.
2. Select the languages you would like to make your web page instantly available in. You can pick all languages, or select individual languages by selecting the "Specific languages" radio button, then checking the languages you'd like to automatically translate your web page into.
3. Copy and paste this snippet of code into the BODY section of web pages that you would like to make instantly available in other languages.

Collected information

For normal web pages, Google may log a small portion of the text for translation quality purposes but not in a way that is associated with a Google Account. The website translator also works securely if it's embedded on a web page that is served from a secure server. In such cases, the content of the web page will be sent to Google for translation using a secure connection (HTTPS), and Google will not log any of the text.

Embedding on intranet pages

The Translate Web Element will work if it's embedded on a web page that's hosted within a corporate intranet. However, since the Element cannot distinguish intranet web pages from normal web pages, intranet web pages are handled like normal web pages. So unless it is hosted on a secure server, a secure connection will not be used to send the content of the web page to Google for translation. As with the translation of normal web pages, Google may log a small portion of the text for translation quality purposes but not in a way that is associated with a Google Account. Please check with your system administrator or IT department before embedding the Translate Web Element on intranet pages.

AdSense

The Translate Web Element will not interfere with AdSense code that may be embedded in your page.

Preventing translation of your webpages

If you're a webmaster and would prefer your web page not be translated by Google Translate, just insert the following meta tag into your HTML file: <meta name="google" value="notranslate">

If you don't mind your web page being translated by Google Translate, except for a particular section (like an email address, for example), just add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example: Email us at <span class="notranslate"> sales at example dot com

From time to time, we may feature certain website URLs on Google Translate to provide demonstrations of our translation technology. Such examples should not be seen as an endorsement by Google of these websites or their content. If your site is featured in this way on Google Translate, and you would rather it weren't, please contact us.

Search engine indexing

The automatically translated version of your web page will not be indexed by search engines.