Worried about understanding a piece of information you can’t seem to make the head or tail of? Here’s a new language identifier called LangID that you might be interested in trying .
LangID claims to be the quickest way to retrieve information about a language you don’t know. And, yes… It’s free 🙂
How is LangID different from free online translators?
You must have experienced that most free online translation services ask you to select the language you want to translate a piece of text from. What do you do when you don’t know what language it is? In such cases, LangID comes in handy.
- LangID understands and tells you in which language a text has been written and then uses an external service to translate it.
- LangID will give you the current English name of the language and an icon with the flag of one of the countries this language is spoken in.
Languages supported
LangID uses Google Ajax API to identify the languages. Currently it supports 85 languages:
- Afrikaans
- Albanian
- Amharic
- Arabic
- Armenian
- Azerbaijani
- Basque
- Belarusian
- Bengali
- Bihari
- Bulgarian
- Burmese
- Catalan
- Cherokee
- Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dhivehi
- Dutch
- English
- Esperanto
- Estonian
- Filipino
- Finnish
- French
- Galician
- Georgian
- German
- Greek
- Guarani
- Gujarati
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Inuktitut
- Italian
- Japanese
- Kannada
- Kazakh
- Khmer
- Korean
- Kurdish
- Kyrgyz
- Lao
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Macedonian
- Malay
- Malayalam
- Maltese
- Marathi
- Mongolian
- Nepali
- Norwegian
- Oriya
- Pashto
- Persian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Punjabi
- Romanian
- Russian
- Sanskrit
- Serbian
- Sindhi
- Sinhalese
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish
- Swahili
- Swedish
- Tajik
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Thai
- Tibetan
- Turkish
- Ukranian
- Urdu
- Uzbek
- Uighur
- Vietnamese
You can query the service by directly writing the text, uploading a file, sending an email or by tweeting them @langidbot.
Since the service is still very new, some of the functions might not work. It will be interesting to watch what other features the service can provide in the future and if it plans to add more languages to the list.
Next time you come across a piece of text you aren’t really sure of, then try out this free web service that allows you to identify in which language the content has been written in. I might just come in handy.
Link: langid
One Comment
Anyone can do this with the help of Google Translation API 😛