In Google’s vision of the future, people will be able to translate documents instantly into the world’s main languages, with machine logic, not expert linguists, leading the way.
Google’s approach, called statistical machine translation, differs from past efforts in that it forgoes language experts who program grammatical rules and dictionaries into computers.
Instead, they feed documents humans have already translated into two languages and then rely on computers to discern patterns for future translations.
While the quality is not perfect, it is an improvement on previous efforts at machine translation.
So far, Google is offering its own statistical machine translations of Arabic, Chinese and Russian to and from English.
Third-party software gives access on the site to German and other languages.
Google’s focus always seems to be “let’s make it really, really good” which is why things stay in Beta for so long.
After a long series of intense beating in the Google Labs, projects go out for public Beta testing.
As part of the general Google philosophy, once it’s really useful and it has impact, Google looks to find ways on how to make money out of it with advertising or offering stand alone versions for business.
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Well even though Russian translations are still in BETA, I’ve used it a couple of times and it’s remarkably more accurate than translators I’ve seen before. It’s not yet at the point where you could trust the translation without post-process editing, but at least it’s actually readable. It’s pretty awesome how Google is doing this, and the results they are achieving.
Hi Tony. Thanks for popping by my little corner of the internet.
With Google, things are in BETA for a long time but like you said, Google is awesome for doing this.