Google Translate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
|
| URL | http://translate.google.com/ |
|---|---|
| Type of site | translation |
| Registration | no |
| Owner | |
| Created by | |
| Current status | beta |
Google Translate is, as of May 2009[update], a beta service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, or a webpage, into another language. 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.
If the user is translating English to French, for example, and the language needs to be swapped into reverse order (French to English), clicking "swap" will reverse the orientation of the language translation.
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]
Contents |
[edit] 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 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.[6]
[edit] Options
 |
Wikinews has related news: News services and World Wide Web companies increase Farsi services after Iranian presidential election |
(by chronological order)
- Beginning
|
- 2nd stage
- English to Portuguese
- Portuguese to English
- 3rd stage
- English to Italian
- Italian to English
- 4th stage
|
- 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)
|
|
- 8th stage (launched October, 2007)
- 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)
- 11th stage (launched September 25, 2008)
- 12th stage (launched January 30th, 2009)
|
As of July 7, 2009 These are the language available by Google translate
Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Maltese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese [1]
[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, such as "translate this page" and "translate (specific) text."
[edit] References
- ^ "Google Translate". Google. http://translate.google.com/. Retrieved on 2009-01-24.
- ^ Google shakes up the translation memory scene
- ^ Franz-Josef Och confirmed this during his keynote speech at the MT Summit 2005, stating that "We do not need rules any more."
- ^ Keynote speech at the Machine Translation Summit 2005
- ^ Google seeks world of instant translations (Reuters)
- ^ 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.
- ^ Miguel Helft, "Amid Iran Turmoil, Google Adds Persian To Translation Service," New York Times 19 June 2009, Bits technology blog.
[edit] See also
- Comparison of machine translation applications
- List of Google services and tools
- Babel Fish (website)
- Bing Translator
- Asia Online
[edit] External links
- Home page
- Franz Josef Och
- Google translate, statistical machine translation live
- Fun things to do with Google Translate
- Google Translator with Human Touch
