A new free service called Twitrans launched today that allows Twitter users to quickly translate any short message to a variety of languages. The translation is farmed out to humans using the OneHourTranslation platform and results are promised in a few minutes.
Here’s how it works. You send a Twitter message to @twitrans followed by the translation requested (English to Chinese would be en2zh). A test message I sent: “@twitrans en2zh Testing out twitrans, a new Twitter translation service.”
The service uses humans, so it’ll presumably yield better results than Google Translate or similar automated translation services.
While I waited for a response the service sent me a message saying “Human translation started. You’ll receive the translation here in a few minutes. Thank you! “ (they sent that to the wrong Twitter account, but I’m guessing they’ll fix that).
Ten minutes later they sent this message back to me: “尝试一下twitrans吧，一种新的翻译服务” I have no idea what that means, but I’m hoping it’s a decent translation. Just to be sure I sent it back to them in Chinese and asked them to translate it to English. If I translate this message back and forth enough times with the service, I’m betting I’ll get some crazy results.
Messages can be translated to/from Arabic-ar, Chinese-zh, Dutch-nl, English-en, French-fr, German-de, Greek-el, Hebrew-he, Hindi-hi, Italian-it, Japanese-jp, Portuguese-pt, Russian-ru, Spanish-es.
Love the twitter but is there some type of twitter coment strike going on? lol.
this is such a cool service! i can now send tweets in portuguese to my portuguese friend YAY!
This is awesome. The future is here, wait… there it goes! No, wait… here it comes!
Can @Twitrans work @TheTweet ???
This is really cool!
now I just need to find someone that understands Chinese
Having OneHourTranslation on twitter is neat (AND it is free…)
We have had a demo service up for a while at http://mloovi.com/twitter. Not human translations so the quality won’t be as good but it does mean that you can read and Tweet in 35 languages instantly. I use it to follow some Chinese Tweeple as well as others from Germany & Holland. Must admit we can’t compete with the quality of human translations but if youwant to just follow and read other languages ours may be a quicker option.
1. twitrans is key for bringing asian and european blitters across to the usofa during those limbo hours from 8pm pst to 4am pst.
Perfect anthro example is the story of the baby born 2 days after mother’s death … @sonsomar
2. Michael, DONT YOU SLEEP?
I think Mike is rolling off the adrenaline of the Crunchies.. he’s been on blog blast.
twitrans does well,the translation of the example is outstanding.
Very cool! Adding the human factor is leaps and bounds ahead of the automated translators, accounting for grammar, phrasing, etc. With a global economy focusing more and more on markets that operate in a non-western alphabet, who WOULDN’T benefit from this? Well done Twitrans!
Love the idea but can this scale to meet the demand and given the realtime nature of twitter will people be prepared to wait 1 hour. Guess the next model is to charge people for faster translation times.
The Chinese result is pretty good, but your message is too simple, need to try something more complicated
If I translate the Chinese you got back from twitrans into English, you get this: “Give twitrans a try, it’s a new translation service. ”
When I tried your test sentence with google translate, I think I got a better Chinese translation
“测试twitrans ，一个新的Twitter的翻译服务”
Looks to me the human translator that translated Mike’s test sentence had no idea what the hell twitter is
Hi,
Thanks everybody for your warm words.
I hope Twitrans will help you communicate better with your overseas friends & colleagues.
The bug is fixed, of course.
Yaron Kaufman, CEO
OneHourTranslation.com
Michael,
Great staff!!!
Will use it…
Bookmarked.
Brooke
Just tried Twitrans which gave great results for a short SMS to French and then moved to http://www.oneh...translation.com to get couple of pages translated. also got great results with a decent price
So how can it be free if the translations are done by real people at One Hour Translation, which is not free?
great concept, but if there is a wait and its sent back to you, whats the point? You’d be better off just going to Google translate and doing it yourself. Faster.
The problem with google is the low quality of the translation. I agree that they better send it to the real recipient after translation
google translate’s quality is not great. this translation (though i realize it’s only one sentence) is actually quite good – it’s clear it was written by someone very familiar with chinese (either a native speaker or otherwise). it’s the use of 一下 and 吧 that shows it was written by a person vs. a machine. google translate gives you this: 测试twitrans ，一个新的Twitter的翻译服务…not as good.
haha your text:
“Testing out twitrans, a new Twitter translation service.”
says: (translated by a native chinese and english speaker, lived in both countries for 10+ years)
“Try out Twitrans. It’s a new translation service.”
Seems they added a bit of marketing into your message, knowing you wouldn’t know what it said
Thanks for the post!
This application is being added to Twitdom – The Twitter Applications Database shortly.
very cool, lads.
what’s the next surprise from 3 innovators?
This seems to be a useful service. Got to go give it a try now…
Wow , another brilliant app for twitter. Thanks
Great service and it’s free too… can’t wait to try it.
I think you are thinking like sukrat, but I think you should cover the other side of the topic in the post too…
hey people from you tube
Another leap forward from onehourtranslation.com!
I was checking onehourtranslation.com’s website and the rates they pay their translators way way below normal for some language pairs. As I’m a Chinese-English translator myself I know that you cannot find good Chinese-to-English translators for those rates even for projects with huge volumes. Paying those rates for small pieces of text could only buy a company absolute bottom of the barrel translators.
But, that’s still going to be better than machine translation and the twitrans is free so it’s cool! I surely wouldn’t have an important business document or press release translated by them though!
Twitrans seems like a nice little translation tool addon for the twitter community. I agree with the comments above that the machanical translation is not perfect however it’s better than nothing, at least the reader gets a general understanding.
We have an iPhone application which can in real time translate Tweets. It uses Google’s AJAX API so it is not as good as human. But it is fast and convenient.
Check it out:
http://tidbit.t...g/twitterworld/
or in iTunes Store
http://bit.ly/Z0uaY
I agree with Tait. For a free service like twitrans, I’m sure onehourtranslation.com is fine, but if you’re looking to translate serious material I would look elsewhere. A professional translator would never work for the rates they offer.