Google have been providing their useful Google Translate service for quite a while now but today seems to be a rather special day. They’ve finally released a support for Persian, something I think is much more appropriate than colouring the Google logo green for a day – simply because this is it far more useful to the current online ‘revolution’. It means I can not only translate useful sources such as BBC Persian but also all those Persian blogs I so wanted to read during my dissertation hell.

However, I think it’s important to say that this is a machine translation and of course it’s not perfect. But it’s a start and it means it can be developed and evolve into a practical solution for the spread of information. And, with respect to the theme of my dissertation it may in fact be used as another strategy to overcome online censorship, through enabling Iranians to translate English into Persian.

Facebook are also in on the action and the launch of Apple’s latest iPhone software has introduced support for the Persian script – Read more about this on Is This Ta’arof?.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Iran, News and tagged as apple, blog, blogging, censorship, google, internet, iphone, iranian, persian. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.