Google Search Translation Service Tested

I have had rather vast experience as freelance translator so I am particularly interested in testing all translation-related Web tools. There are some good translation and language-learning communities online (and we have already mentioned some of them). But I have never seen any good example of machine translation. I have seen funny examples, ridiculous examples, even hilarious examples. But never in my life have I seen a good (or even so-so) example of machine translation.

I always thought that using machine translation to localize your web service into various languages to attract more users usually ensures very poor results: new users only come to give it a try in their native tongue and leave for good to spread the word of new anecdotic examples of machine translations. I would not name any products not to offend anyone but those who actually have their content machine-translated into other languages will know.

So I thought no company would risk giving machine translation a real serious try. I was wrong. It looks like giants like Google can afford such an approach and they really believe it can be good. So Google has launched search translation service in beta promising they will translate the whole web to facilitate multi-language search. "We have been working on translating all of the Web to all languages," Google VP of engineering Udi Manber said. "The results are probably not perfect, but the information you want will be there." So I could not resist and I rushed to test this new product. Not to sound too critical I think I should mention here that I use at least 5 of Google Web-based services myself and in most of the cases I am satisfied with the results and occasionally I actually admire them and I suspect that when Google does something it usually does it well. But definitely this latest addition to Google's product range is not the case for me.

Basically this new search translation services can be described in 3 steps:

1. You put the search query in one language (your mother tongue).
2. You specify the language for the web pages to be searched for.
3. Google translates the results from their original language into the language you want to view them in.

So I chose my language as Russian (my native one) and asked Google to perform a search for the term "Web 2.0 blog" (in Russian, of course) for me. The translation of the search query was fine but when it comes to more complicated queries the results may be far from true and you can offer a better translation by clicking the respective link. I should mention that I know perfectly well what blogs appear on Google's first page for my query so I was not afraid of being lost in the results. Mercifully, they have given us the option of viewing the results in both your language (left column) and in their original one (right column that can be hidden). But anyway if I did not have the results in English, I could hardly even guess what the Russian results mean anyway. It is a classic example of how machine translation (Google names it "automatic translation") works and it's really a poor work which is almost disappointing when it comes to such a prominent company.

For example, if we translate the Russian results back into English Techcrunch is described as "a group of editorial offices blog on technologies of launch" ("Group-edited blog about technology start-ups"). Profy is a "multi-purpose author of a blog" (originally "multi-author blog") but in our case a startup was translated into Russian as any person starting anything while for Techcrunch it was more related to launch of a rocket or a missile. I will not offer you more examples here because instead of being funny they are disappointing and even aggravating.

Why? The answer is simple: while I personally could compare the two versions of results, this new service is actually aimed at a general Internet user only proficient in his or her mother tongue to provide this user with additional opportunities, to allow "users across the world to find and view search results on foreign language web pages in their own native language". And without knowledge of the original language the results (the links, I mean) will be shown Ok but their descriptions will make no sense at all.

I know it is beta but I can hardly imagine they will hire all the translators on Earth to translate all the web into all the languages so even when out of beta it will remain machine translation ("translation produced by state-of-the-art technology, without the intervention of human translators" according to their About page) and I'm afraid the machine translation technology is still too immature to enable Google to provide the results that actually make sense to users.

Currently the following languages are included: French, Arabic, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and traditional and simplified Chinese. So I invite you all to give the service a try (and contribute with better translations - finally, in web 2.0 users generate value, not only the technology) and if you find something interesting, I will be happy to see your opinions in the comments section below - what if the service is actually useful in some other languages?