Google Translate pinyin launched

Although we applaud Google for launching Google Translate pinyin (everyone gets credit for trying, no?), we’re disappointed by how basic it is.

The pinyin function is pretty straight forward: input Chinese into the “Enter text or a webpage URL” section. Once that’s in, look below the box and you’ll see a “Show romanization” button. Click it. Done. Pinyin will show up at the bottom below the Chinese.

Although a decent tool if you’re only getting the pinyin for single character words, if you’re looking to do anything more complicated that, things get a bit hairy.

The Pinyin News blog explains in detail exactly what’s wrong with Google Translate pinyin once you start trying to work with more complicated texts, but essentially it all comes down to broken syllables.

Google Translate pinyin makes it so that each pinyin "word" pairs with one character and is separated from other pinyin by a space (in Google’s defense, this is how most Chinese students are taught to do it), which means that the pinyin translations for Chinese words that are made up of multiple characters are broken up. More importantly since the program breaks up words, some of the pronunciations/tones are wrong. We can forgive the system for minor sins like terrible spacing and lack of capitalization, but incorrect pronunciations are a different story.

Google Translate pinyin, we expect better.