Now this is interesting. I’ve blogged before about Google’s tools and how they can help with learning Bengali, but this week they made another advance.
As part of an expansion into what it terms the Indic web, Google now translates Bengali (along with Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu).
Online translation is always a bit hit and miss, and so it proves for the moment with Google Translate (see below).
But it seems to work well enough to get the gist of articles and it will work with both Bengali script and Bangla words written in Roman script.
It also includes an option for a Bengali script keyboard, though this didn’t seem all that user-friendly when I gave it a go.
Google translated extract from সিঙ্গুরে অনিচ্ছুক চাষিদেরকে ফর্ম বিলি on আনন্দবাজার পত্রিকা:
Singure reluctant to deliver Form casiderake
The form of government to give land back casidera singure reluctant to begin delivery of this administration.
Sandhyeya emergency meeting yesterday at the Statesilpamantri Perth basena Chattopadhyay.
Taraparai Hooghly district administrationand the office of the El B singurera rabibarei to the delivery of the form.
A Tangle Of Wires 
Thanks for the link It’s something and I’m sure it will get more sophisticated in time!
Off to K in August! 🙂
🙂 In deep Bengal where English has not yet penetrated but Google has, we’ll soon have people talking this Google-Benglish – and a new language will be born! :))
– Mybangladiary, eventually the possibilities could be very interesting, so I think for now it’s just nice to see Bengali doesn’t get left out of these kinds of things.
Enjoy your trip! Hope the language practice is going well.
– Suja, based on how it currently works that could be one confusing dialect 🙂
The good news is, google translate now has bengali !
It got “Ami bangla jani na ” right. But this is what I got from a Haleem Jaffar Iqbal story (Nupur):
(might be hard to read. Its : ‘Piyaal Shaukat Maamaake dhore phisphis kore bollo “Mama, shubd koro na. Pori ure jaabe.” ‘
পিয়াল সাউকাত মামেক ধরে ফিসফিস কের বললো ” মামা, সব্দ কর না. পির উড়ে জেব
translated as:
Piyala saukata mamake years of her phisaphisa “Mama, do not subdha. Whatever you can fly.”
Good lord! Anyway, it didn’t do ekotro, or tibro, or ganganir. But it DID do hotchokito. (flabbergasted)
Sounds like ‘use with caution’ is the best bet.