Google Translate just added Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Georgian, and Urdu

I just noticed these five new additions to the menu on Google Translate (all marked ALPHA) and sure enough, they were added just today. Every one of these except Azerbaijani (mostly the same as Turkish) is quite new territory, as Armenian and Georgian use unique scripts, Basque is unrelated to other languages, and Urdu also uses a different script from Hindi even though the two are also almost the same.

As always, alpha translations are quite rough but if it makes the Armenian Wikipedia comprehensible where it wasn't before then it's a big step up.

Featured article on the Armenian Wikipedia: the Armenian Genocide. Collaboration of the week: the Armenian Genocide. Prominent Armenian of the month: Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian Genocide survivor. Okay, I think we have an idea of the issue the Wikipedia users there want to highlight.

Georgian is pretty general in comparison: the featured article is on U2, the current project is Kenya, and the only mention of Russia is a historical note about a railway line that started construction in 1836.

And finally, Basque: Basque whaling, news on the UK election, pretty general stuff.

Basque is probably the largest beneficiary of these changes, considering its status (no independent country uses Basque as its sole official language) and recent successes at revival/strengthening, which will only be bolstered by this.

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First Turkish - Urdu dictionary is introduced

Strange - according to this article the first Turkish - Urdu dictionary has just been released, after four years of work. One would have thought that a dictionary of that type (two languages of quite large size and close geographic proximity) would have already existed, but the article says otherwise. A quick search turns up a Sanskrit - Turkish dictionary and there certainly must be a few Hindi - Turkish dictionaries out there as well.

The rest of the article is just about how the dictionary will help relations between Turkey and Pakistan, and apparently the presidents of both countries will be presented with one and have made a statement commemorating the occasion as well. The person who compiled the dictionary was Dr. Furkan Hamit, who was born in Pakistan in 1961 and first graduated in Turkish language and literature in 1982.

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More BBC News in other languages on YouTube by the end of the year

Great news, because it's never much fun to try to use a site's own video player when YouTube is always the easiest to use. Actually BBC radio in other languages is quite easy on the computer, but video's not quite as fun and will sometimes need to buffer or can tax system resources. Unfortunately it won't be in Turkish yet, but hopefully that'll happen soon too:

BBC Global News has extended its relationship with YouTube, the leading online video community, by signing an agreement to add six BBC video news channels in Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Persian and Urdu to its existing BBC World News channel.

In what is the first multi-language deal by a major international news broadcaster with YouTube, users will have access to high quality, independent and impartial news clips produced by the BBC World Service in six languages.

Video news stories will run each day across the different language Channels and each channel will be branded and tailored to its specific audience.

The videos will also be fully discoverable via Google Video search.

Here are all the other languages you can currently listen to BBC in.

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