Google does a decent job translating Web pages from other languages, but machine-based translation is still not good enough for when you need a truly accurate translation. A new service called the Google Translation Center looks like Google is making its machine-translation technologies available to human translators. If you have a document that needs translating, you can upload it and request a translator to work on it, according to the marketing information on the site. (I was unable to actually sign in with my Google account, so this may not have fully launched). The service can accommodate both professional and volunteer translators, and will let them use Google’s automatic translation tools and dictionaries to do their work. This could make translations a lot easier to do because the machine translation tools could take a first pass at the documents, meaning the translator would just have to correct any mistakes instead of starting with a blank screen.
The Translation Center is set up as a marketplace for matching translators with people who need texts translated. It supports both paid translations and volunteer ones. In a sense, the system is like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, in that it finds humans to do work that computers are not yet proficient at.
The system also keeps track of previous translations, and matches new ones against its “global Translation Memory.” 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. Google Blogoscoped has more details.
This is great news. Translation companies charge way too much and this will help silence those making claims that their translation technology is inherently superior. At the end of the day, as long as you have a reliable native-language human editor then this tool from Google will suit you just fine. That is unless you are translating arcane engineering or medical device manuals.
I agree and like Jimmy Wales has mentioned: “it makes sense for humans to do what humans do well and for computers to do what computers do well.” And what we do well is make good judgment calls, which computers do terribly bad.
absolutly agree with Juan,
Just use http://OneHourTranslation.com and got wonderfull results from a native Spanish speaker and for a great price
This will in fact be very helpful to Google’s tech/algo in the long run.
But what would be the motivation for someone to volunteer.
In terms of paid services, there are just so many alternatives available now.
Also, would you feel comfortable uploading important, copyright works?
Hey,that sounds good.Now cross language issues can be dealt in the better way possible.and involving human translators together with machines is a really cool combo.This will work for Google..
We try to handle a multilingual webpage approach with an automated FAQ-system for mental health / psychology. This approach would be very useful for some languages. We used Systran maschine translation for some texts and corrected these texts ourselves. I will try to use the Google tool for other language pairs.
M. Winkler Rosche, Germany
Sounds like a wonderful solution. I’m curious as to what kind of interfaces they”ll offer for the programming side of things. Will there be an API my app can query to pull translations? What format will it be in?
This really is cool. I’m so happy Google decided to do this. Thank you so much for this information.
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Thanks again for this article!
Love the combination of machine and man, all for the purpose of translating. It will be cool when cyborgs can translate our texts! http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
Misleading headline.
If Google is working hard on it, it’s bound to be a good one.
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
grr, doesn’t work
Will it support LOLspeak?
While Amazon Mechanical Turk can be used to provide translation services, it can be used for any purpose where a human service is needed. In that sense, “Google Takes On Mechanical Turk” is a misleading title.
I so agree.
Damn I was gonna do this for my next startup. Oh well.
Erick: interesting how the educated guesses from the original source turn into facts. Less investigation, more factition.
Hey, there’s only a login page so far. Or have you at least gotten PR from GOOG?
You are as many a person as languages you know.
Ah, this may be what I’ve waiting for to get my book and blog translated on a recurring basis… Thanks, Techcrunch.
Is it free to use?
Another awesome development from the Googlers - great idea. However I don’t see this as Mechanical Turk competition - that service is for virtually *any* human task - translation is just a small part of MT’s biz I think…
I agree with Joe - this is not a direct competitor to MTurk. This is much more focused solely on translation and looks like it has much richer tools. MTurk ‘hits’ focus on small tasks that anyone can do but are too difficult for computers to do - such as tagging images, transcribing video, or researching on the web.
But so much of translation is domain specific (medicine, engineering, technology, etc.). Hopefully this service will help customers find these subspecialists.
i dont get it. the link doesnt work.
It sucks. Typical crappy UI.
Horrible.
Obviously, this is another Google’s quest on collective intelligence consistently. Aggregating human translation and machine translation will surely improve the quality of machine translation in long run. Good move.
The idea is good, i hope that they provide some kind of API to make it easy to integrate with my translation mashup which is already using Google translations services, Open Calais and others…
I wonder how translators are gonna get paid. Google Payments ?
Sounds great but all I get is google.com, it redirects there. What’s a correct URL?
this service already exists at http://www.tolingo.com since start of the year. only in german so far, but growing up rapidly.
we offer a real time marketplace together with a browser based translation software with all the key features like global translation memory, spellcheck, dictionaries and so on.
at tolingo both the professionals as well as the semiprofessionals are paid for their work.
feel free to check out at tolingo.com
hey … check out their home page .. the one currently on it is the translation done by computers n nt human… I speak a language my national language called hindi .. and its extremely difficult to see, read or understand the pathetic translation google offers from english to hindi !
You could have talked about http://www.cucumis.org/ taht you reviewed on techcrucnh 2 years ago. We are doing exactly the same thing since 3 years. Except there is only volunteers, no money involved.
From my experience with cucumis, the most difficult part, is to proofread the the translations. We have a team of more than 100 volunteers admins there.
I’m very interested to see some results. To date, machine translation has been a complete nuisance for the language pair I work with, befuddling the translators rather than helping them. We have always been better off just working with the English source.
Just curious, what language pair do you work with?
Thai and English.
The Thai government has spent years and loads of money trying to automate translation. They need it because English language skills are severely lacking in the Kingdom. But the results are still quite poor. Commercial tools I have tried are worse.
Being a guild-oriented industry, someone has to shake those fatty translation agencies.
I already work with http://www.onehourtranslation.com , which is similar in concept and amazingly fast.
I’m actually happy with this new buzz around the translation world, this would be without doubt good for the consumers.
The Google Translation Center looks like it aims to be a marketplace coordinator and tool provider
kaltenbach.startkabel.nl/
Hi,
I’m a translator at http://onehourtranslation.com and I don’t understand why should I work for free to help Google improve their MT if I can get a per word payment over there?
I didn’t do a lot f work yet but It’s very nice to handle system and I’m able to earn money while at home with my new baby
Let’s hope it’s a good tool.
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