Thanks to reader Dierk Seeburg for sending the link to an article from the Washington Post about Google’s new Google Translation Center service (not yet fully launched, login seems not to work using a regular Google account). The Post article has a link to a yet more interesting article on Google Blogoscoped where one can even view some screen shots of the Translation Center.
At least to the untrained eye, this looks like an interesting combination of Google’s existing language tools, an online translator workbench including the source and target text and a column for “Previous Translations,” and on-demand access to human translators (this part looks similar to SDL’s Click2Translate service).
I think that the most interesting part of the article on Google Blogoscoped is the one in which co-editor Tony Ruscoe muses about the implications of Google’s reported plan to “match current translations with previous ones.” He points out that “This sounds like what the industry calls a Translation Memory” and brings up the question of ownership of the TMs created by the Translation Center.
At the end of the post, Philipp Lenssen says that Google has now “removed many of the pages and files in question,” but this looks like a translation website worth keeping an eye on.
I would agree with the point made by the Washington Post article, “That makes this project sound like a way for Google to collect a good set of translations to help improve its core translating algorithm, more than as a standalone business”. Unlike Systran, which powers most Web-based MT services, Google is a statistical translation engine (cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation#Statistical ) so they need to acquire further translation memories to better train and finetune the system, especially for areas or language pairs that might not be covered by the corpora used so far.
I think it’s quite interesting to compare Systran and Google Translate results for the same text – quality really varies a lot depending on type of material, with Google Translate performing extremely well in some areas.
I made a widget that translates all 24 languages that Google supports. Just today made it into a WordPress plugin that is free to install at http://getinternationalclients.com/translation-plugin/.
Once installed and activated it appears as an option in the widget panel so you can add it to your sidebar where you wish.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope Google make it a good tool.
http://transubstantiation.wordpress.com/
Up until now, there has been, on one hand the unsatisfactory but free automatic translation programs, and on the other hand the option to pay for a professional translation service either provided by independent translators or by a translation company. It is already possible, for the more inquisitive buyer, to recruit on line their own human translator but generally speaking companies have more of a tendency to confide their projects to a translation agency.
Translation businesses bring access to professional translators in every language and in several fields of expertise. They analyse and prepare the work prior to translation, control turnaround times, serve as a point of contact both to the clients and the translators, sometimes acting as the voice of the customer to the translator and sometimes that of the translator to the client. They assure correct delivery of the final project to the client and also handle payment issues controlling client creditworthiness and assuring timely payment for themselves as well as the translator. At least this is the way we work at Anyword and how most of our competitors currently operate.
In this context is Google Translation Centre a threat to translation agencies? It is possible (and even probable) that initially a number of clients seeking to make savings will contact the translators directly. Over time these clients will either settle for the minimal solution and remain loyal to Google Translation Centre or they will wish to benefit from a veritable intermediary service and return to the agencies.
I do hope so. It is however necessary to clarify an important point: the service launched by Google is not a novelty. There are already existing human translation on line recruitment systems which are extensively used the translation companies. What is new is that Google authorise the “volunteers” to register themselves as translators on their service. By “volunteer” one must understand “voluntary” and therefore in most cases “inexperienced”. This means that the customers utilising this service are running an important risk that Google refuse to endorse in their general conditions of use.
This is what makes me think that businesses, always reluctant to take unnecessary risks, will not adopt Google Translation Centre. This debate is, of course open on the Translators Observers blog run by Anyword.
Guillaume de Brébisson
Anyword translation service
Google Translation Center is only a mechanical tool.
The organistical human side still needs to be addressed.
Check the following Social Group about Google Translation Center:
http://collaborative-translation.ning.com/group/googletranslationcenter
Google Translation Center service improved long way process of translation, so time will be a translation as cleaner and more similar to human translation.
Though there is a big improvement over time
machine translation still has quite limited usability
this wonderfull