Google Translate

Google Translate is a 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. 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.

Functions

The service also includes translation of an entire Web page. The translation is limited in number of paragraphs per webpage (such as indicated by break-tags <br>); however, if text on a webpage is separated by horizontal blank-line images (auto-wrapped without using any <br>), a long webpage can be translated containing several thousand words.

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 deliver accurate translations and does not produce publication-standard content, for example it often translates words out of context and is deliberately not applying any grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis. [Franz-Josef Och confirmed this during her keynote speech at the MT Summit 2005, stating that "We do not need rules any more."]

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, [Keynote speech at the Machine Translation Summit 2005] 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. The same document is normally available in all six official UN languages, thus Google now has a 7-language corpus of 20 billion words' worth of human translations.Fact|date=December 2007

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. [Google was an official sponsor of the annual Computational Linguistics in Japan Conference ("Gengoshorigakkai") in 2007. Google also sent a delegate from its headquarters to the meeting of the members of the Computational Linguistic Society of Japan in march 2005, promising funding to researchers who would be willing to share text data.]

Options

(by chronological order)

*Beginning
**English to Arabic
**English to French
**English to German
**English to Spanish
**French to English
**German to English
**Spanish to English
**Arabic to English

*2nd stage
**English to Portuguese
**Portuguese to English

*3rd stage
**English to Italian
**Italian to English

*4th stage
**English to Chinese (Simplified) BETA
**English to Japanese BETA
**English to Korean BETA
**Chinese (Simplified) to English BETA
**Japanese to English BETA
**Korean to English BETA

*5th stage (launched December , 2006)
**English to Russian BETA
**Russian to English BETA

*6th stage (launched April , 2006)
**English to Arabic BETA
**Arabic to English BETA

*7th stage (launched February , 2007)
**English to Chinese (Traditional) BETA
**Chinese (Traditional) to English BETA
**Chinese (Simplified to Traditional) BETA
**Chinese (Traditional to Simplified) BETA

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

*9th stage
**English to Hindi BETA
**Hindi to English BETA

*10th stage (as of this stage, translation can be done between any two languages) (launched May , 2008)
**Bulgarian
**Croatian
**Czech
**Danish
**Finnish
**Hindi
**Norwegian
**Polish
**Romanian
**Swedish

*11th stage (launched September 25, 2008)
**Catalan
**Filipino
**Hebrew
**Indonesian
**Latvian
**Lithuanian
**Serbian
**Slovak
**Slovenian
**Ukrainian
**Vietnamese

Criticism

Due to the possibility of users suggesting "better translations" of given texts, there have also been manipulations and pranks found in the tool.

The Slovenian-English original beta version contained several pranks. For instance, Google Translate translated "Janša je lep" ("Janša is beautiful") into "Sanader is beautiful", "Slovenska obala" ("Slovenian coast") into "Croatian coast", "Ljubljana" into "rape", "Kranj" into "Miami" and "Koper" into "Chicago". [cite news|publisher=Žurnal24|url=http://www.zurnal24.si/Slovensko-je-hrvasko/novice/svet/71156|date=October 5, 2008|accessdate=2008-10-05|title=Slovensko je hrvaško|author=Davor Hafnar]

References

ee also

* Comparison of machine translation applications
* List of Google services and tools
* Babel Fish (website)
* Windows Live Translator
* Asia Online

External links

* [http://www.google.com/translate_t Home page]
* [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/04/statistical-machine-translation-live.html Google translate, statistical machine translation live]
* [http://www.securecottage.com/cgi-bin/reference.cgi Web Portal that uses Google Translate]