Chinesebay.com got the exciting news! Our Online Jyutping dictionary has been officially published.
Just add the Chinese characters after http://Chinesebay.com/py/ and pretty enter, you will get both Jyutping and Mandarin Pinyin for the characters.

You may play the Cantonese human voice too by clicking “Say it in Cantonese” button or “Say it in Mandarin” button. Although some sound may not be quite correct, we are trying to improve it.

For example, you can get the Jyutping and play the sound of these characters 生日快樂 by clicking at the Chinese characters.

1)聖誕快樂 (Merry Christmas!)
2)新年好 (Happy New Year!)
3)請問，廁所喺邊度啊 ( Excuse me, where is the restroom?)
4)復活節快樂！ (Happy Easter!)
5)聽日我唔得閑。 (I will be busy tomorrow.)

We name this dictionary as Jyutping & Pinyin Cantonese-Mandarin Dictionary. So you may also get the Pinyin for the Chinese characters although some Cantonese characters cannot be found in Mandarin or may be used by Mandarin-speakers at all. You may also find the link to Google translation of the Chinese characters, but on many occasions, the translation may be funny or just wrong because Google Translate only take those words as Mandarin, which may be very different from Cantonese.

For example, the following may be funny Google Translation.
我想同佢结婚. (I want to marry him/her) Google Translation: “I want to same drainage marry.” What?! drainage? same? 同 in Cantonese = 和 in Mandarin.

More than 20 years ago, a friend who was going to get a PhD in computer science in Japan told me that he was going to create some computers that can complete replace human translators. I thought “Wow! That would be amazing!” However, now I believe that even 20 more years from now, the computer cannot replace human translators. I do believe that with the progress in machinery translation, the translation job has become much easier than before.

A Big Challenge to Google: Google Translation for Cantonese

Some people in Google may not think that Cantonese is not as important as the more than 52 languages for which they offer services in Google Translate. As early as 2010 , Norm said “I am looking forward to Google adding Cantonese(Chinese) into the
Google Translate. ”

On Feb 10th, 2010, Josh (Google Employee) said

Just about every day we hear from a user, or potential user, asking us
when or if we’ll support translations to/from language X. While we’re
quite proud that we already support 52 of the worlds languages, there
are still many more languages that we would love to enable for our
users…. but unfortunately launching a new language is hard.

Yes, it is true. It is a big challenge for Google. Just wonder how Google is handling it.