Google Translate gets more conversational

Google Translate is notorious for spewing out either oddly worded or overly formal results, but the company says it's getting better thanks to people's help. Mountain View's online translator is now more adept at figuring out informal speech -- for instance, it can tell if you want to ask "Is everything alright?" when what you've typed in has another more literal translation, as you can see below the fold. That's all made possible by the volunteers who spend time translating phrases and checking the quality of other people's submissions on the Translate community website. The company promises to incorporate more and more translations over time as its service learns each language better. Hopefully, that means locals won't look at us funny next time we try to use it overseas.

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