Google Translates Persian

As the Internet becomes a more important path for information between Iran and the rest of the world, Google has added support for Persian to its Google Translate service.

Google didn’t specifically tie the release of the service to the post-election protests that are currently gripping Iran but noted on a company blog that the release is “particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran.”

Social media has proved key in helping people communicate and get around government censorship and Google noted the service could be used to translate “Persian into English and from English into Persian—whether it’s a news story, a website, a blog, an email, a tweet or a Facebook message.”

you can read more from the Official Google Blog:

Today, we added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. This means you can now translate any text from Persian into English and from English into Persian — whether it’s a news story, a website, a blog, an email, a tweet or a Facebook message. The service is available free at http://translate.google.com.

We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone’s access to information.

As with all machine translation, it’s not perfect yet. And we’re launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times. We’ll keep a close watch and if it breaks, we’ll restore service as quickly as we can.

We’ve optimized this service for translation between Persian and English. But we’re working hard to improve Persian translation for the additional 40 languages available via Google Translate. If you see something you think is incorrectly translated, we invite you to click on the “contribute a better translation” link and we’ll learn from your correction.

The web provides many new channels of communication that enable us to see events unfold in real-time around the world. We hope that Google Translate helps make all that information accessible to you — no matter what language you speak. So please visit Google Translate and try it out.

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Fedora has just released a new major version, Fedora 11, around six-and-a-half months after the release of Fedora 10. The changelog is extensive, but the screenshot tour shows an alluring operating system. You can read the entire Fedora 11 changelog here, but it’s rather unwieldy. For changes more likely to concern you, visit the Changes in Fedora for Desktop Users page for specifics on desktop, network, printing, multimedia, games, and other tweaks.

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