Google translator

By-Asmita MerIntroduction:Google Translate is a free statistically-based machine translation service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, document or webpage, into another language.

The service was introduced in 2007. Prior to that Google used a SYSTRAN based translator[1]

which is used by other translation services such as Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo.

The service limits the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, that will be translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language. [1] For some languages, users are asked for alternate translations such as for technical terms, to be included for future updates to the translation process. Text in a foreign language can be typed, and if "Detect Language" is selected, it will not only detect the language, but it will translate into English by default.

Unlike other translation services such as Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo which use SYSTRAN, Google uses its own translation software. Some say that this could lead to a revolution in modern language industry.[2]

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations. Some languages produce better results than others.[citation needed]

It does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis.[3]

Languages written in Devanagari or the Arabic script and its variants can be transliterated automatically from phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet

Google has given Google Translate a face lift that it plans to roll out worldwide over the next few days (it’s live for us now).

The new look is cleaner and intended to highlight the many ways that users can use Translate, including in Gmail, search, and through the Chrome extension. It’s a nice graphical upgrade, and though Google uses the word “functional” in it’s blog post on the announcement, we don’t really see what has changed functionally. We’ve emailed Google for clarification.

UPDATE: A Google representitive responded that, “There were no functionality changes with this launch,” which is what we thought.

Google ends the post by asking for people with stories about Google Translate to send them in. Google is also highlighting how Translate works behind the scenes, and provided this video done by JESS3 called “Inside Google Translate“:

Google Translate's coverage has been expanded dramatically. It now supports the translation between any of the following languages: English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish (the new languages are shown in bold). From 26 language pairs, Google Translate now supports 506 language pairs and becomes the most comprehensive online translation tool available for free.

Obviously, the translation is far from being perfect or even coherent, but it's a great way to understand the central ideas from a text. Now that Google Translate supports so many languages, it's not hard to imagine that you'll be able to read almost any web page in your language and maybe any application will be able to use Google Translate's APIs to speak your language.

"Most state-of-the-art, commercial machine-translation systems in use today have been developed using a rule-based approach, and require a lot of work to define vocabularies and grammars. Our system takes a different approach: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. (...) Automatic translation is very difficult, as the meaning of words depends on the context in which they're used. While we are working on the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer a quick and seamless translation experience," explains Google Translate's FAQ.

Google Translate is a free automatic translator. It works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead. Google Translate currently supports translation between any of these 57 languages:

Afrikaans Albanian Armenian (Alpha) Azerbaijani (Alpha) Arabic Basque (Alpha) Belarusian Bulgarian Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian

Galician Georgian (Alpha) German Greek Haitian Creole (Alpha) Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Italian Irish Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian

Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu (Alpha) Vietnamese Welsh

Filipino Finnish French

Malay Maltese Norwegian

Yiddish

Translation to and from Alpha languages may not work as well as other languages, as these systems are still in early stages of development. Learn more about the inner workings of Google Translate.

Translate text instantlyTo translate words and phrases, simply select your translation languages and start typing. The translation result should appear instantly as you type, without you having to click a single button. Note that you'll need Javascript enabled to take advantage of our instant translation feature. You can always click the Translate button to trigger a translation.

When you translate a single word, you may see a simple dictionary at the bottom indicating parts of speech and possible word variations. For most language pairs, you'll also see a View Detailed Dictionary link. This will display a more detailed Google Dictionary page with example sentences, images, and more.

If you aren't sure what language you're attempting to translate, the "Detect language option" can figure this out for you. The accuracy of the automatic language detection increases with the amount of text entered.

Read and listen to your translationIf you're trying to translate to a non-Roman script, you'll see a Read phonetically link next to the translation. Clicking this link will spell out the translation in Roman(Latin) characters. This feature is currently available for Armenian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Georgian, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Maltese, Russian, Serbian, Thai and Ukrainian.

For many languages, you may see also a speaker button near the translated text. Click this icon to hear a machine-generated spoken version of your translation. This feature is currently available for English, French, German, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Italian and Spanish.

An experimental text-to-speech system (TTS) is available for several other languages, powered by the eSpeak open-source speech synthesizer: Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh. You may notice significant differences in speech quality between the experimental languages and the other available languages.

Input text phonetically

Many languages are difficult to type if you don't own a special layout keyboard for that script. When translating from Russian, Hindi, Serbian, Greek, Arabic, Persian or Urdu, you'll see an "Allow phonetic typing" checkbox near the input area. This feature allows you to type these languages as they sound in English - for example, "aap" for "आप" in Hindi. When you press space, the word will be converted to Hindi script, and its translation will be displayed below. The phonetic typing feature is on by default; uncheck the checkbox to turn it off, when you want to input Roman characters. Phonetic typing does not interfere if you are using -+a native-layout keyboard for such languages.

Translate entire webpages

Translate an entire web page directly from Google Translate, simply by entering its address (e.g. "www.google.com") into the input box and clicking Translate.

If you hover your mouse over the translated text, the original text for the highlighted segment is displayed in an info bubble just above the translated text. To see all of the original text of the page, click the View: Original radio button in the top frame of the translated page. Now, when you hover your mouse over the original text, the automatic translation for the highlighted segment is displayed in an info bubble.

Translate documents from your computer

Google Translate also provides an easy way to translate whole documents, without the need for copying and pasting large blocks of text. Simply click the translate a document link and submit your file as a PDF, TXT, DOC, PPT, XLS or RTF. Please note that some of your original formatting may not be preserved.

We're constantly working to improve the quality of our translations. Even today's most sophisticated software, however, doesn't approach the fluency of a native speaker or possess the skill of a professional translator. Automatic translation is very difficult, as the meaning of words depends on the context in which they're used. While we are working on the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer human quality translations. In the meantime, we hope you find the service we provide useful for most purposes. If, while using Google Translate, you notice that our translation could be better, hover your cursor over the translated term and click Contribute a better translation to suggest improvements. We're also working to support other languages and will introduce them as soon as the automatic translation meets our standards. It's difficult to project how long this will take, as the problem is complex and each language presents its own unique challenges. In order to develop new languages and improve the quality of existing languages, we need large amounts of bilingual texts. You can help by using Translator Toolkit for translating or uploading your translation memories into Translator Toolkit

Google Translated SearchWhat is Translated Search?

Sometimes the best results for your search query may not be in your language. Translated Search is your window into the multilingual web. This feature of Google Search allows you to type queries in your own language and view results from around the world translated back to your language, all powered by Google Translate.

To search websites in other languages, click Language Tools below the search box on google.com then:

1. Type one or more search terms into the search box.2. Select the language of your search term in the "My language" dropdown.3. Select the "Specific languages" radio button in the "Search pages written in" section

4. Select the language, or languages, of the websites you'd like to search.5. Hit the Enter key or click the Translate and Search button.

Google translates your search term and performs a search using the translated terms. The search results are then translated back into the language you selected in the "My language" dropdown. Click a translated result and you'll be taken to an automatically translated version of the page.

Edit the translated search term

If you know the translation of your search term isn't quite right, just click Edit next to the translated query on the search results page to edit it. Then press Enter or click the search button to search using the corrected search term.

Advanced search operators

The site: and filetype: advanced search operators are currently supported. You can stop a search term from being translated by putting a + sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the + sign.)

Google Translate for WebmastersWhat is the Google Translate Web Element?

The Google Translate Web Element allows you to instantly make your website available in other languages. After you enable the Element on your webpage, visitors to your webpage will be offered the option to view a translated version of your website.

Visitors whose web browser language is different from the that of your website will see a banner at the top of the page prompting them for translation. Other users can, if they choose, trigger translation from a dropdown menu on your page with a list of supported languages. When a visitor translates a page, the Web Element sends the text of the web page to Google Translate and displays the translated text without reloading or redirecting visitors from the page. If the visitor clicks on a link in the translated page and the linked web page also has the Element embedded in it, the linked web page will also be automatically translated for the them, allowing them to seamlessly browse through your website in their language.

How do I enable the Web Element on my page?

Visit the Element setup wizard and follow these simple steps:

1. Select the language in the language drop-down that your web page is written in.2. Select the languages you would like to make your web page instantly available in. You can

pick all languages, or select individual languages by selecting the "Specific languages" radio button, then checking the languages you'd like to automatically translate your web page into.

3. Copy and paste this snippet of code into the BODY section of web pages that you would like to make instantly available in other languages.

What else should I know about the Element?

Collected information

For normal web pages, Google may log a small portion of the text for translation quality purposes but not in a way that is associated with a Google Account. The website translator also works securely if it's embedded on a web page that is served from a secure server. In such cases, the content of the web page will be sent to Google for translation using a secure connection (HTTPS), and Google will not log any of the text.

Embedding on intranet pages

The Translate Web Element will work if it's embedded on a web page that's hosted within a corporate intranet. However, since the Element cannot distinguish intranet web pages from normal web pages, intranet web pages are handled like normal web pages. So unless it is hosted on a secure server, a secure connection will not be used to send the content of the web page to Google for translation. As with the translation of normal web pages, Google may log a small portion of the text for translation quality purposes but not in a way that is associated with a Google Account. Please check with your system administrator or IT department before embedding the Translate Web Element on intranet pages.

AdSense

The Translate Web Element will not interfere with AdSense code that may be embedded in your page.

General information for webmasters

Preventing translation of your webpages

If you're a webmaster and would prefer your web page not be translated by Google Translate, just insert the following meta tag into your HTML file: <meta name="google" value="notranslate">

If you don't mind your web page being translated by Google Translate, except for a particular section (like an email address, for example), just add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example: Email us at <span class="notranslate"> sales at example dot com .

Approach

Google translate is based on an approach called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Franz-Josef Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003. Och is now the head of Google's machine translation department.

According to Och,[4] a solid base for developing a usable statistical machine translation system for a new pair of languages from scratch, would consist in having a bilingual text corpus (or parallel collection) of more than a million words and two monolingual corpora of each more than a billion words. Statistical models from this data are then used to translate between those languages.

To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used United Nations documents. [5] The same document is normally available in all six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish), thus Google now has a 6-language corpus of 20 billion words' worth of human translations.[citation needed]

The availability of Arabic and Chinese as official UN languages is probably one of the reasons why Google Translate initially focused on the development of translation between English and those languages, and not, for example, Japanese and German, which are not official languages at the UN.

Google representatives have been very active at domestic conferences in Japan in the field asking researchers to provide them with bilingual corpora.

Features and limitations

The service limits the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, that will be translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language.[2] For some languages, users are asked for alternate translations such as for technical terms, to be included for future updates to the translation process. Text in a foreign language can be typed, and if "Detect Language" is selected, it will not only detect the language, but it will translate into English by default.

QAGoogle Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations. Some languages produce better results than others. As of 2010, French to English translation is very good;[3] however rules based translators perform better as the length of text to be translated becomes shorter; this effect is particularly evident in Chinese to English translations.[3]

Texts written in the Greek, Devanagari, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts can be transliterated automatically from phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet.

[edit] Browser integration

A number of Firefox extensions exist for Google services, and likewise for Google Translate, which allow right-click command access to the translation service. [4]

An extension for Google's Chrome browser also exists[5]; in February 2010 Google translate was integrated into the standard Google Chrome browser for automatic webpage translation.[6][7]

[edit] Language options

(by chronological order of introduction)

1st stage

English to French French to English

English to German English to Spanish

German to English Spanish to English

2nd stage

English to Portuguese English to Dutch

Portuguese to English Dutch to English

3rd stage

English to Italian Italian to English

4th stage

English to Chinese (Simplified) English to Japanese English to Korean

Chinese (Simplified) to English Japanese to English Korean to English

5th stage (launched December 2006)

English to Russian Russian to English

6th stage (launched April 2007)

English to Arabic Arabic to English

7th stage (launched February 2007)

English to Chinese (Traditional) Chinese (Simplified to Traditional)

Chinese (Traditional) to English Chinese (Traditional to Simplified)

8th stage (launched October 2007) o all 25 language pairs use Google's machine translation system

9th stage

English to Hindi Hindi to English

10th stage (as of this stage, translation can be done between any two languages, going through English, if needed) (launched May 2008)

Bulgarian Croatian Czech

Danish Finnish Norwegian

Polish Romanian Swedish

11th stage (launched September 25, 2008)

Catalan Filipino Hebrew

Indonesian Latvian Lithuanian

Serbian Slovak Slovene

Ukrainian Vietnamese

12th stage (launched January 30, 2009)

Albanian Estonian Galician

Hungarian Maltese Thai

Turkish

13th stage (launched June 19, 2009)

Persian

14th stage (launched August 24, 2009)

Afrikaans Belarusian Icelandic

Irish Macedonian Malay

Swahili Welsh Yiddish

15th stage (launched November 19, 2009) o The Beta stage is finished. Users can now choose to have the romanization written

for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hindi and Thai. For translations from Arabic, Persian and Hindi, the user can enter a Latin transliteration of the text and the text will be translated to the native script for these languages as the user is writing. The text can now be read by a text-to-speech program in English, Italian, French and German

16th stage (launched January 30, 2010) o Haitian Creole

17th stage (launched April 2010) o Speech program launched in Hindi and Spanish

18th stage (launched May 5, 2010) o Speech program launched in Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin),

Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh (based in eSpeak)[8].

19th stage (launched May 13, 2010[9])

Armenian Azerbaijani

Basque Georgian Urdu

20th stage (launched June 2010)

Provides romanization for Arabic.

21th stage (launched September 2010)

Allows phonetic typing for Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Serbian and Urdu.

[edit] Translation methodology

It does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis.[10]

Google translate is based on an approach called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Franz-Josef Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003. Och is now the head of Google's machine translation department.

To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used United Nations documents.[12] The same document is normally available in all six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish), so Google now has a 6-language corpus of 20 billion words' worth of human translations.[citation needed]

The availability of Arabic and Chinese as official UN languages is probably one of the reasons why Google Translate initially focused on the development of translation between English and those languages, and not, for example, Japanese and German, which are not official languages at the UN.[citation needed]

Google representatives have been very active at domestic conferences in Japan in the field asking researchers to provide them with bilingual corpora.[13][citation needed]

[edit] Translation mistakes and oddities

Because Google Translate uses statistical matching to translate rather than a dictionary/grammar rules approach translated text can often include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors,[14] often swapping common terms for similar but nonequivalent common terms in the other language,[15] as well as inverting sentence meaning.[16]

Overview

We here present how Google translate works. If you want to find out how automatic translation works on Google translator, then you will need to read this article.

Google translator is one of many newly design web based translator that uses java script to automatic translate many different languages, 57 different languages to be precise. Google translator cannot only translate words and sentences, but also translate pages, books, and even an entire website.

The build in support for website translation enable people of different nationalities and languages sharing information across the internet.

Machine Translation

To understand how Google translate works, you must first understand how automatic translation works. Automatic translate or machine translation (MT), is one of the major technology development 21 century. It uses computer software to translate one language from another.

In general, there are two levels of translation. First is the word for word translation. Computer will try to match one word from one language to same word from another language. Second, computer tries to recombine words into the language and make it flow more naturally. The second step is the hardest part, because for machine to sound as good as a human, it needs to have many algorithms that people inputted.

That is when the Google translator comes in. Google made its stockpile of information available on the Google translator. The machine translation is done by finding patterns of data of people’s typing on the Google database. While it is by no mean perfect, but comparing with other software, such as the Babel Fish, which uses a rule based system, Google’s machine translation is way superior.

Statistical Machine Translation

The core algorithm to make 'Google Translate - Machine Translation' works is statistical machine translation (SMT). SMT uses statistical model to determine the word translation. This basic method doesn't follow any language translation rules.

To make statistical model, we need bilingual text corpora/corpus. Bilingual text corpus is a 1database of source sentences and target sentences. For example if we want to build statistical model for English to Spain translation, we need a database of English sentences and Spain translated sentences. The more sentences the more good statistical model we have.

Computer will be trained to calculate probability word distribution statistic from above sentences. For example if word AAA has probability 80% to be translated into BBB, then we confident that AAA can be translated into BBB.

Since it doesn't rely on any linguistic rule, SMT can be used to make translation any pair languages. Although it need times to make bilingual language corpora, but the result is much better than ruled-based translation.

The combination SMT and ruled-based translation will make translation better.

How to get bilingual text corpus?

We know that Google Translate supports many pair language translations. Google gathers bilingual text corpus from many documents. They scan the original version books and the translated version. They crawl websites which have two or more language versions. Sometimes they hire translators to translate from one language to other language.

After they have bilingual documents, Google do word alignment. They have software that can align source sentences and translated sentences. This software creates database pair of source sentences and translated sentences.

Basic SMT Language Model Flow

Above picture is the basic of creating SMT language model. First step is collecting many documents from many sources. Then system will align sentences and create database of pair sentences (bilingual text corpus).

System will be trained using that corpus. It will analyze the statistic of word distribution in each sentence. The output of this training is language model. Each pair translation has their own language model. Language model will be updated each time the system learn new corpus.

Using this language model we can translate other sentences.

Overview on Statistical Machine Translation

Benefit of SMT

SMT have benefits over traditional translation method (e.g: rule based translations):

Generally SMT translator is not tailored to support specific languages. It builds to support many pair of languages so SMT have better use of resources. It means building SMT translator is cheaper than traditional method.

Depending on the number of bilingual of corpus, SMT translator gives more natural translations. The more bilingual corpus it has, the more translator trained with new bilingual corpus, the more natural translation it has.

Google Translate

While there are many machine translation software on the internet, Google translator is clearly in the front of the pack. One of Google automatic translator’s clear advantages is the phonetic typing.

Google translator allow user to translate more than just Latin based languages by enabling a web based phonetic keyboard right on the translator. Many languages such as Russian, Greek, Hindu, Serbian, Arabic, and Urdu, have different words other than English, but their words may sound like certain terms in English. For example, the "aap" in English sounds very much like "??" in Hindi.

Critics on Google Translate

However, Google’s automatic translate is not without critics. Even though its pattern recognition system is way more natural sounding and accurate than rule based system, it cannot be remotely close to a human translation.

Many linguists believe that Google’s machine translation is simply sounded too “machinelike”. While pattern recognition may help getting information cross different languages, the computer itself just simply cannot account for all the patterns in all the languages. Will Google translator gather the entire language speech pattern in the future?

Will Google translator match the skill of a human translator? That is questionable, because there are just too many speech patterns for Google to collect. However, as Google gathers more and more information about each language’s speech pattern, it will be more and more perfect in the foreseeable future.

How does google translation center actually work?

Blogoscoped reports that Google is preparing to launch Google Translation Center, a new translation tool for freelance and professional translators. This is an interesting move, and it has broad implications for the translation industry, which up until now has been fragmented and somewhat behind the times, from a technology standpoint

Google has been investing significant resources in a multi-year effort to develop its statistical machine translation technology. Statistical MT works by comparing large numbers of parallel texts that have been translated between languages and from these learns which words and phrases usually map to others — similar to the way humans acquire language. The problem with statistical MT is that it requires a large number of directly translated sentences. These are hard to find, and because of this SMT systems use sources like the proceedings from the European Parliament, United Nations, etc. Which are fine if you’re writing in bureaucrat-speak, but aren’t so great for other texts. Google Translation Center is a straightforward and very clever way to gather a large corpus of parallel texts to train its machine translation systems.

Part machine translator and part translation memory (a sort of search engine for translation that helps translators to recall translations), GTC will help translators by providing a free, global translation memory, and in turn drive costs down by reducing the amount of work needed to complete a text. It will help Google by providing an excellent source of high quality parallel texts that can be fed back into the statistical translation systems.

If Google releases an API for the translation management system, it could establish a de facto

standard for integrated machine translation and translation memory, creating a language platform around which projects like Der Mundo can build specialized applications and collect more training data.

On the other hand, GTC could be bad news for translation service bureaus — especially those that use proprietary translation management systems as a way to hold customers and translators hostage. Most translation bureaus aren’t really technology companies and aren’t very competent at building quality software. Google Translation Center fills a void in the translation tools market that was created when the few independent companies, such as Trados, were acquired.

For freelancers, GTC could be very good news; they could work directly with clients and have access to high quality productivity tools. Overall this is a welcome move that will force service providers to focus on quality, while Google, which is competent at software, can focus on building tools. Google has a pretty mixed track record with consumer-facing services outside its core search business. But if it positions itself as a neutral service provider, it could enable projects like Der Mundo and others to create powerful and easy-to-use translation services for a broad range of industries.

Translation management is more complex than it appears, with different practices in different industries. If you’re translating a news story, you want minimal cost and fast turnaround time (publish early, correct often). If you’re translating a product spec sheet, you’re willing to spend more to have it done right before it goes to press. Google would be smart to position GTC as a utility for translators and to encourage service bureaus to standardize around it, much as it did around earlier tools like Trados, and much as it has done with their keyword ad business. That strategy would also eliminate a potential conflict of interest, as translation professionals are understandably wary of contributing to something that could put them out of work, as well as avoid channel conflicts with partners who will be their best advocates in selling to various clients.

While it’s my guess that Google has no intention of directly monetizing the service (charging a commission on transactions it brokers would expose Google to a billing and payment disbursal nightmare), the R&D value of collecting millions of parallel sentences in every language pair imaginable is indisputable, and it will pay off in unforeseen ways. So, my guess is Google will make this a free tool for the translation industry to use, and it will figure the money part out later. It can afford to be patient.

Translation is a very difficult problem. If it weren’t, it would have been solved a long time ago. I remain convinced that a multilingual web will be a reality in a short time, and that a menagerie of tools and services will emerge over the next few years — some geared toward helping translators, some toward building translation communities, and others that make publishing multilingual sites and blogs easy and intuitive.

As these emerge, the web will begin translating itself, and within a short time, we’ll be able to read content from sources worldwide just as we currently explore the web in our own language today.=============And another one: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10005605-93.html

Google looks set to launch a beta test of a document translation service, a new move in the

company's efforts to break down language barriers.

With the service, the company will connect people who need documents translated with humans who will be paid to do so, according to the Google Translation Center information page. The site was spotted by sharp eyes at the Google Blogoscoped blog.(Credit: Google)

"Google Translation Center is the fast and easy way to get translations for your content. Simply upload your document, choose your translation language, and choose from our registry of professional and volunteer translators. If a translator accepts, you should receive your translated content back as soon as it's ready," the site said.

Google prefers to rely on computer algorithms rather than humans, so at first glance the Google Translation Center looks somewhat anomalous, even though Google is only playing a middleman role. But it's possible that the human translators might be gradually improving Google's machine translation technology as they work, in effect helping to put themselves out of a job.

That's because Google's translation system uses a statistical model that works better the more it can compare the same text in two different languages. And Google evidently will track translation work in its database; according to the center's introduction for translators, "our translation search feature matches your current translation with previous translations, so you don't have to translate over and over again."

Google is fervently interested in better machine translation. With it, it can use its search technology to link people with data around the world, regardless of language barriers, making its search engine significantly more powerful.

Wanted: More Rosetta StonesGoogle's translation technique essentially relies on having as many Rosetta Stone-like documents as possible. The more documents it has in two languages, the better able it is to match words and phrases from one language to another, according to a recent speech by Jeff Dean, a Google fellow who works Google's computing infrastructure.

"By computing statistics over all words and phrases, you...get a model of word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase replacements," Dean said. Machine translation often produces awkward results today, but "the impact of having a really large language model makes the sentences flow a lot more easily."

The screenshot below, from Google, shows the online interface a Google translator apparently will see. It shows text in two languages, with the passage broken down into chunks of text. It also suggests a previous translation of one chunk, offering a "use suggestion" button to employ it. It's not clear if the previous translation draws just on that individual translator's work or a larger collection.=========And another one: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-08-04-n48.html

Google is working on a new service called Google Translation Center. Just a short while ago, we noticed that “center” had been added to Google’s robots.txt file, and now co-editor Tony Ruscoe discovered the link to the working frontpage... though logging in fails right now.

According to the Google explanations on the frontpage and their product overview page, we can see this is meant to be a translation service which offers both volunteers and professional translators... and I suppose at least the professionals will want to get paid. In that regards, the service is in the field of sites like Click2Translate.com (a service by the company which Tony works for, incidentally, and which I’m often using for some of my sites).

Here’s what’s printed as a description on the service’s frontpage:

Request translations and find translatorsUpload your document and request translations into over 40 languages. [*]

Translate and review translated documentsCreate and review content in your language through Google’s free, easy-to-use, online translation tools.

Type what you want in your english/french/spanish etc, etc..And then just press translate

If you write something long i find that it doesnt properly translate into what your looking for though...

Google Translate is as of February 2009[update] a beta service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, or a webpage, into another language, with limits to the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results ifrom the selected destination language in the source language. [1] For some languages, users are asked for alternate translations such as for technical terms, to be included for future updates to the translation process.

Unlike other translation services such as Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo which use SYSTRAN, Google uses its own translation software.

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations. Some languages produce better results than others.[citation needed]

It does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis.Google translate is based on an approach called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Franz-Josef Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003. Och is now the head of Google's machine translation department.

According to Och,[3] a solid base for developing a usable statistical machine translation system for a new pair of languages from scratch, would consist in having a bilingual text corpus (or parallel collection) of more than a million words and two monolingual corpora of each more than a billion words. Statistical models from this data are then used to translate between those languages.

To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used United Nations documents. [4] The same document is normally available in all six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish), thus Google now has a 7-language corpus of 20 billion words' worth of human translations.[citation needed]

The availability of Arabic and Chinese as official UN languages is probably one of the reasons why Google Translate initially focused on the development of translation between English and those languages, and not, for example, Japanese and German, which are not official languages at the UN.

Google representatives have been very active at domestic conferences in Japan in the field asking researchers to provide them with bilingual corpora.[5]

Google translate creates tools for transalation services

Google's Translation Centre, launched in 2008 and now called Google  Translate can be a valuable tool for translation services. Although, people initially thought that Google translate would present stiff competition for online based translation service, the centre provides useful and advanced software that can dramatically cut back the time spent on translations by the companies. It also provides a database of translators who can check the translations made by the software, and translation service providers are able to tap into these resources too if they are can't find their own resources.

The Google Translation Centre can be used by translators to do the first draft of their translation that they can then check for sense and meaning. The service is still free for the time being, and if used intelligently by online translation services, this tool can support them rather than stand as competition. The human resource behind this online tool is what makes it truly useful. Previous translation programmes yielded inaccurate results due to the complex nature of language. However, Google supports their translation programme with a database of volunteer and professional translators.

Unlike some critics initially thought, the service should not take work away from professional translation service providers. The need for translators is increasing and it's one industry that is set to bloom despite the recession. Professional translation services provide a package deal to companies, so they are unlikely to take their work to Google, where they will have to manage the translation process themselves.

Translation management is an intricate skill; there are very different translation needs for different industries. For example, a news story will need to be translated very quickly at a low cost, while a student manual might take more time and require a more experienced translator, as well as quality checking and probably accreditation. The advantage of Google

translate is that it can  be used as a standard of measure for all online translation services, and in this way there is no conflict of interest.

Google's translate is one step closer to creating a completely multilingual web system.  With a solid backing of experienced translation professionals and technology, Google could streamline the translation process on the web to the advantage of web users and translation professionals. Freelancers can also benefit from the resource as it allows them a space in which to market their skills and engage with other professionals.

Does Google Docs Translation Tool Really Work?

Not too long ago, GT covered the news on Google Docs new translation tool. Google themselves announced this news on their official blog and also mentioned that the “translation isn’t perfect”, but thankfully Google also says they continue to work on improving their translations.

Having read this, I wonder… how good is the translation tool in Google Docs really? I’m fluent in a few languages, so I decided to put it this to the test.

First, I opened up a new Google Document, and while trying to figure out what I could possibly translate that might resemble a real world example, without bothering the GT readers with my boring personal documents, I decided to just copy and paste this post into a new Google Doc file and translate it from English to Dutch, Portuguese, and German. I could try other languages as well, but it wouldn’t be much use if I can’t be sure whether or not the translation worked.

After copying in pasting the paragraphs above into a new Google document, I clicked on “Tools” and “Translate Document”.

Then, I selected the language of my choice, in this case I started with Dutch.

A new window popped up with my quick ‘n easy Dutch translation in it. The first couple of sentences looked good, but soon enough I found some pretty serious, and hilarious, inconsistencies. For the Dutch speaking among you, here is my translati

Google Translate is one of the most popular computer-aided translation services, however, using an online-translator for text translation is inconvenient: you have to launch the browser, open the website, copy and paste the text, select the language... Too time-consuming!

Now you can translate web-pages, electronic mail and other documents without opening online-translation sites and buying expensive bulky programs. This free translator is always at hand – you simply need to select the text with your mouse!