kNow Media » translation

Google Translator Kit: Automated Translation Meets Crowdsourcing

Tyler Knowlton — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:23:52 +0000

Only a handful of blogs picked up on Google’s fresh Translator Toolkit, which the company launched yesterday by means of a blog post, but this new service really deserves a second look, if only because Wikimedia apparently sees the tool as something that could “change the way Wikipedia grows in other languages”.

You can read an extensive review of the product over at Google Blogoscoped, but here’s the gist:

Google Translator Kit enables anyone to upload documents for a variety of formats (HTML, Microsoft Word, Rich Text, OpenDocument Text and Plain Text), enter the URL for a file on the web or input a direct link to a Wikipedia article or Knol entry. After submission, the text that requires translation is automatically translated in the back-end and subsequently featured in a so-called ‘Workbench’, neatly placing the resulting text in the target language next to the original.

Google will search their translation memory for previous, human translations of the uploaded segment and show the translations in the Search Results tab. Color-coded segments will depict ‘exact’ matches and ‘partial’ matches, so you can edit the text based on the memory as well as previous, human translations. In addition, you can use the computer-generated translation in the Computer Translation tab to jump-start the translation of your current segment. When available, the toolkit will also search Google’s multilingual glossaries to help you translate specific terminology for your language, or you could use the Dictionary tab to do custom searches on Google’s multilingual dictionaries.

Besides the self-learning ability of the toolkit, the service also makes it incredibly easy for people to collaborate on translations, bringing a human, crowd-sourced touch to the automated process of Google’s Translate service.

(Thanks for the heads up, ArabCrunch)

YouTube Translate: So Your Babushka Can Get What Your Video Blog is About

Tyler Knowlton — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:00:58 +0000

Via Mashable

ovember 1, 2008 – 5:03 pm PDT – by Paul Glazowski

It was this past Thursday, in our review of another review service, when I figured that Google should seriously consider generating automated translations for YouTube clips to build on its relatively young captions capability. Well, today it began to do just that.

Before you become giddy for this fresh new option, it must be said that this is Google’s Translate service being worked into the picture. Which means the world flow is more or less abysmal to anyone with a reasonably firm grasp on one language or another. The good news, though, is it can only get better as development progresses.

The way the Translate feature works is for you, the video uploader, to create a caption from which the translation engine can feed from. …And that’s pretty much the extent of it! It’s all automated and on-demand from there onward.

Naturally, it depends on the source language and the translation being requested that determines the quality of the switch.

TC50: AlfaBetic Translates Your Blog For A Worldwide Audience, Free of Charge

Tyler — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:37:29 +0000

Via Tech Crunch

by Jason Kincaid on September 9, 2008

AlfaBetic is a translation service that offers publishers a free way to have their content translated to ten of the web’s most popular languages, which it says will expose them 842 million potential new readers.

The service first runs text through a computer, which is similar to the web-based translation systems offered by Google Translate and a number of other sites. After generating this rough translation, AlfaBetic then presents the translated text to paid human translators, who ensure that everything makes sense. Alphabetic says that over time it will be able to reduce its costs by making the original automatic text more accurate using “statistical machine translation”.

The service’s most impressive feature is its ability to keep comments consistent across every translated site, as well as the publisher’s original blog – I could leave a comment on TechCrunch Russia and have it appear on TechCrunch.com, translated to English. These comments are still translated by machine and read by a human, but the company says that the process only takes a few minutes.