Fun with Google Translate

With certain languages Google Translate is appallingly bad. Ever tried to translate from Arabic into English? You’ll be hard pressed to ever understand what the English translation says let alone the Arabic original. I can imagine that the case is the same for quite a few other languages.
That said, there are some languages, such as French, where the translation is much more accurate. The translations can’t necessarily be trusted as being perfect, and often with languages where dialect or formal speech is an issue, Google Translate usually tends to get it wrong. The Google service still does come in pretty handy when translating emails, forum messages or even entire websites. But that’s not all that Google Translate is good for. You can push the limits of this tiny Google service and you’d be surprised at what you can get in return.

Beatbox

One of the most fun things to do with Google Translate to date has to be turning it into a beatbox. First posted on Reddit, the hidden feature that Google themselves probably never even imagined is making the internet rounds.

Paste the following text into Google Translate:

pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpvpvzk kkkkk bsch

Select German to German translation, and press Beatbox. Google has clearly embraced this discovery, replacing the Listen button with a Beatbox button.

For the ‘Techno’ version, select Chinese to Chinese Simplified/Traditional translation.

Create Sound Effects

Once beatboxing was discovered, it wasn’t long before people were trying to find other interesting sounds you can get out of Google Translate.
To simulate the sound of a machine, an old car, or possibly even a chainsaw, paste the following text into Google translate and select Croatian to Croatian translation.

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

To simulate the sound of a helicopter, the following text has been suggested when selecting German to German translation.

kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk