Looking at a document, website, or even just a description on a piece of art written in a dilect of Inuktut? Now you may be able to get a translation online using Google Translate.
This is the first Canadian Indigenous language available on Google Translate. It was chosen in part because the language is widely used online, making it relatively easy to develop a machine translation program. Some other Indigenous languages are spoken by more people, but aren’t used on line very much.
The Inuktut translation program covers the different dialects used throughout Canada, Alaska, and Greenland regardless of whether the text is written in syllabics or the Roman Alphabet. This will only translate written Inuktut to English or vice versa. There’s currently no verbal translation tool. (And it doesn’t work in other languages like French either.)
Google notes that there will be errors, but that they expect to do a reasonable job with a language with as many variations as Inktuk seems rather amazing. Now all you collectors need to go and see how it works to translate all those titles and texts you’ve wondered about all these years!
Read more on Google’s Canada Blog, Multilingual.com, or the Nanaimo News Bulletin.