For now, this feature only works for language pairs that include English: en:fr, fr:en (French), en:it, it:en (Italian), en:de, de:en (German), en:es, es:en (Spanish), en:ru, ru:en (Russian), en:zh, zh:en (Chinese), en:ja, ja:en (Japanese), en:ko, ko:en (Korean).
If you use the language pair en:en (English to English), Google shows definitions from Google Dictionary. For example, a search for [en:en astute] shows the definition of the word "astute" and the pronunciation. Google Dictionary uses definitions from Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary.
You can also search for [astute definition], but the OneBox result shows definitions from WordNet.
The language pair seems to be available for a very limited set of ISO-639. E.g., English to Hebrew (en:iw), English to Portuguese (en:pt) or Swedish (en:sv) don't work.
ReplyDeleteThe new feature recognizes some, but by no means all, alpha-2 language codes (ISO 639-1), and may not recognize any alpha-3 language codes (ISO 639-2) or alpha-2 country codes (ISO 3166-1). It fails to recognize at least one alpha-2 language code for a language that Google Translate does support.
ReplyDelete"chi" failed (supported language)
"cn" failed (supported language)
"dk" failed (supported language)
"dn" failed (supported language)
"fr" worked
"it" worked
"zh" worked
"zho" failed (supported language)
I do really like this feature, but I will be much happier with it once it starts working with all languages :)
ReplyDeleteThis is a good feature, but I'm worry about that you don't care about turkish :)
ReplyDeleteI like it! It works nicely with English to Spanish and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteAny guess why Google didn't include all languages?
ReplyDelete(More offtopic: I'm really eager to have all languages available, especially since translate.google.com forces me to switch between mouse and keyboard to fill in text, source/target lang, etc, and the top 3 (=too few) choices change too fast (i.e. don't accumulate my usage over time). On top, translate.google.com feels slow to load. A cold cache reload takes 1.26s.)
Maybe because the feature is not documented on Google's site, so it's not officially released.
ReplyDeletecould just use "define:" rather than "en:en"
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't work anymore???
ReplyDeletetoo bad it doesn't work anymore!
ReplyDeleteHow do I enable this feature. It is not working for me.
ReplyDeleteWhen I posted this, the feature worked. Now it no longer works. There are other ways to trigger the smart answers:
ReplyDeleteTranslate ... into Italian
Define ...
Will this feature be back anytime soon? It was very useful for me while worked :-(
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't work for me current. I could have sworn it did at one point.
ReplyDeleteI use "define: " for all my definition queries. For example, "define: astute".
ReplyDeleteDefinitely buggy... For example, "en:en web" doesn't return any results from google dictionary, however, if I access google.com/dictionary directly and search for web, it returns results. Using the define: search operator works normally of course.
ReplyDeletethe following query seems to work:
ReplyDeletetranslate en:nl astute
some language abreviations are different that you'd expect danish for example is da instead of dk. To find the correct abreviation check the address bar in google translate when you select the correct language.
Strange thing is, that"
translate en:da astute
returns no direct result (it does in the translate page op google translate)
translate en:da house
returns a direct result.
I want to work with ro and it
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't work at all at the moment :(
ReplyDelete