While browsing the web or while checking email, especially suspected spam mail which you may accidentally open, many times you may come across text in some unknown language. In view of the fact that there are a large number of languages, usually you may find it difficult or impossible to know the language of such text. However, Google makes it possible to find out the language of such unknown text. There are some other web services too, which are offering help to identify the language of any given text.
(1) Use Google Translate:
For detecting the language of some text, visit Google Translate site. You’ll notice the following interface:
This Translate tool from Google allows you to translate some text or the full contents of any web page from one language to another. At the time of writing these words, Google Translate supports 51 languages for translation. However, it is an intelligent tool in the sense that if you don’t know the language of the text of web page that you want to translate, it can automatically try to detect the language too; and normally the results are reasonable good.
For detecting the language of some text, ensure that the Source language drop-down list box is set at Detect language; the Target language could be any language of your choice. Now, copy and paste the text from the unknown language into the text-box with the title of Enter text or a webpage URL, and then click on Translate button.
For example, I used some text in a language which is not known to me and put it in the above Google Translate text-box to detect the language, see the following figure:
Google Translate detected the language as Thai language and also translated it correctly (in fact, I had taken this text from a translated text of Tech Superb site itself, just to test how successful is the detection of language and found the results to be excellent). See the results:
Remember that Google Translate will be able to detect the language more accurately if you supply more text. If you just supply 5-6 words, the detection of language may not be that good, depending upon the variety of text.
(2) Use Google AJAX Language Detection Tool:
You can detect language of some text also by using Google AJAX Language Detection Tool. Visit this tool, and you’ll see the following screen:
Copy and paste the unknown language text in the text box provided in this online tool and click Detect Language button. It will show you the results with name of the language detected and also as to how reliable the detection is.
(3) Other tools:
There are some other online tools available to detect language of a tool. Please search “detect language tool” or “language identification tool” in your favorite search engine to find out more about them.
Did you like this article? To get all such articles from Tech Superb directly:
Related Articles:
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
