Where's the Pinyin?

Many people have asked why Google translate and Altavista/Yahoo babelfish translator cannot provide pinyin romanization for Chinese translations. Some would think that this would be an easy feature to add and would make their respective translators more useful.

Its often interesting to note that even native Chinese sometimes don’t know how to pronounce some of the less common characters. Would Pinyin help even a native Chinese? I have noticed that the older generations of Chinese people are not familiar with pinyin, however, I have found the younger generation are skilled enough to read pinyin and even write, although sometimes they not too sure about the tones.

So what really are the challenges faced by Google translate and Altavista/Yahoo babelfish in regards to showing Pinyin. One of the biggest challenges is how to display the pinyin cleanly with the character/symbol. You may have noticed here at the PureLanguage, for our translation output, we use tables to align the Chinese word/sentence/idiom, with the Pinyin and English. We also split the Chinese into logical words, so its not one big block of symbols. Splitting up the Chinese block, is also something that Google and Altavista/Yahoo do not attempt. To show the pinyin correctly positioned under the characters, they will need to change their output formatting and add the splitting functionality to their translation code.

Another obstacle they face is that there are some single Chinese characters that have multiple pinyin pronunciations. So which one to show? It’s difficult to know without understanding the context of the sentence. The Pure Language doesn’t guess at the meaning of the content, so it displays all variations. However, Google and Altavista/Yahoo do guessing to provide the translation and grammar, so it could easily select the wrong pinyin variation.

But wait! Hold on! Google has created a Chinese to English Dictionary feature that allows you to look up an English word and get its pinyin, and English translation. Unfortunately, its limited to only one word at a time and there are no Pinyin tones??!! That’s right no Tones?? Very strange!!!
For example when I translated the character: 长
I got the following (somewhat correct, but no tones):
[Pinyin] [chang]
[Pinyin] [zhang]
· long
· to grow
· a strong point ; strength of someone or something
· the length
· the person in charge
· a senior ; a superior
· elder ; older
· to increase ; to acquire

This is extremely limited for someone who wants more than a few words into pinyin. How could someone be expected to use this for a whole page of Chinese characters? What part of the block of Chinese characters is actually the word/idiom? Also, in regards to the above translation from Google, it is my experience that cháng refers to Long (length), and zhǎng refers to Older (chief). There is no distinction from Google here., whereas the Pure Language makes this distinction clearly separating each Pinyin and English variations with slashes.

But who really would want to use this dictionary feature for more than a few words? There are faster and better methods, such as this site Pure Language.
Someone said in another online posts, that Google/Altavista/Yahoo translate where not designed as a language learning tool, but being able to quickly translate or create sentences in other languages. I see their main goal. That is why I have created this site. Not only is it a great learning tool, but also you can use it to validate the translations generated by Google/Altavista/Yahoo and others, to make sure it guessed correctly at the words/meaning of your sentence. You might find it very surprising when you check what you got from these other sites.

On this purelanguage site, you can also generate Pinyin from English entered, or even translate Pinyin back into English and Chinese. Give it a try today! Enjoy!!!