Google made several improvements to Google Translate Monday, such as the ability to translate words written with unique character sets with their phonetic spelling.

Google has been steadily adding languages to Google Translate over the last couple of years, but if the language used a completely unfamiliar character set--such as the Roman-character based languages like English or Spanish versus Chinese characters--the service was only useful for those trying to write in the language. Now Google Translate will help those trying to translate English into Chinese for speaking purposes by providing a phonetic version of the translation in Roman characters.

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