GoogleTalk Chat Bot Translator

Google quietly released something known as a chat bot recently. If you are a user of google talk, the instant messenger, you can simply add in ru2en@bot.talk.google.com as an instant messenging contact. Then anything you send in russian cyrillic will be translated and messaged back to you in english. Also helpful is the reverse, en2ru@bot.talk.google.com will change to cyrillic and translate anything you type in english. It is marvelous for a quick reference translator, and allows for quick translations in real time, and is absolutely free. Definately a go to translator in a pinch and opens up a lot of real time practice opportunities with native speakers. Especially useful with russian as it took me quite a while to get used to the keyboard placement to type in cyrillic. With this quick tool you can quickly type, get translation, and copy paste cyrillic when needed. It is interesting to note some of the difficulties it has in translating the russian cases. You will notice it is not an exact science, translation, as i find most often the cases specific to the russian language it is unable to pick up accurately. It often leaves one a little fuzzy as to who did what to whom, but is certainly better than nothing. Try it out, I think its quite helpful, so should you.

Currently supports these additional language translations: (ex. bg2en@bot.talk.google.com)

ar2en, en2ar (Arabic<->English) , bg2en (Bulgarian->English)
de2en, en2de (German<->English) , de2fr, fr2de (German<->French)
el2en, en2el (Greek<->English) , es2en, en2es (Spanish<->English)
fi2en (Finnish->English), fr2en , en2fr (French<->English)
hi2en (Hindi->English) , hr2en (Croatian->English)
it2en, en2it (Italian<->English) , ja2en, en2ja (Japanese<->English)
ko2en, en2ko (Korean<->English) , nl2en, en2nl (Dutch<->English)
ru2en, en2ru (Russian<->English) , uk2en (Ukrainian->English)
ur2en (Urdu->English) , zh2en, en2zh (Chinese<->English)

[ Back to top ]

Free Russian Keyboard Notepad

To an english speaking learner of russian the cyrillic alphabet can be intimidating at first. Attempting to type in this alphabet can be frustrating. A very useful text editor I have used places a simple keyboard visual layout and allows you to type in cyrillic. It has three options for keyboard layout, allowing you to switch between phonetic, standard, or latin layouts with the ease of a click. Also unlike some other editors I used, this program has a larger text entry area which becomes pretty convenient when practicing larger documents or letters. And the program is absolutely free! They also provide stickers that can be placed upon your keyboard with the cyrillic characters which can be pretty conveniant if you are ready to make the leap to standard keyboard layout usage.

The editor can be found at : www.russianeditor.com

[ Back to top ]