Google is moving too fast and is ahead of everyone in the search industry. There is no one who has the mettle to compete with the search giant, at least for now. What others are doing now, Google has already achieved a name in that domain. Now he’s busy experimenting with the new concepts and innovations that can revolutionize the search industry and unleash the flow of information through all channels.
In recent months, we have all noticed the new changes that Google has made to its algorithms, as well as to the search interface. First it rolled out new features to Google Searchology, then Google I/O the demo release of Google Wave, and now it’s Google Translation Toolkit. Google has launched its new translation toolkit which is better than its previous translation tool and much better than the other translation services available online.
The amazing feature of the new translation tool is the ability to add a human touch to it. But the question arises, why is a new translation method required? Anyone who has used translation services can easily answer this question. It is mainly because the translations were often faulty. The tools could translate the word from one language to another, but many times it was not possible to translate the meaning or context, making the translations irrelevant.
Michael Galvez and Sanjay Bhansali from the Google Translator Toolkit team summarize the tool as:
“For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, they upload the article to the Translator Toolkit, correct the machine translation, and click publish. Using the Translator Toolkit toolkit: search translation tools, bilingual dictionaries and ratings, translate and publish article faster and better into Arabic. The translator toolkit is integrated with Wikipedia, making it easy to publish translated articles. Best of all, our translation system It automatically “learns” from your corrections, creating a virtuous loop that can help translate content into 47 languages, or more than 98% of the world’s Internet population.”
Let’s see what exactly the human touch means in the new tool. To add the human touch, Google has implemented a novel concept of translation memories (TM). It is nothing more than a database of human translations. As the user translates the sentences, the tool looks for older translations that are similar to the new ones. If the two match, the previous ones are displayed to the user, which helps save time and also prevents unnecessary duplication of content.
The Translator Toolkit is currently integrated with Wikipedia and Knol and supports the following formats:
• HTML (.html)
• Microsoft Word (.doc)
• Open Document Text (.odt)
• Plain text (.txt)
• Rich text (.rtf)
The translator toolkit has a clean interface with very few options, making it quite easy for everyone to use. It also has glossary and dictionary options that can be associated to the translation process, in case the user wants to consult his own dictionary.
Google has always stood for the free flow of information and has believed in making the world’s information available to each and every person. The new translation tool is definitely going to transform the language translation process and with the growth of global translation memories, it can even provide users with near-human quality translation.
