Comments on: Google Search Translation Service Tested

By: Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana Gladkova — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 06:56:46 +0000

Arda, thank you very much for your input, it is really great to see someone as interested in the subject matter. The problem with Prompt and other examples (believe me, I tested them all when I worked as a translator is that there is no technology that could recognize the meaning of the source text as well as a human translator can. Believe me, I would love to believe that one day we will see a powerful machine translation technology that will enable us to understand each other instantly without the delays caused by translators working on the letters, documents, contracts, etc. It’s just that even as an early adapter of various new technologies I don’t believe that machine translation will reach any reasonable level of accuracy to be applied at all. And the reason for this post was to demonstrate that even such a giant as Google is can not overcome the difficulties with their technology. You have mentioned a great point here about users being able to edit Google’s translations but the problem is it is only possible to edit the translation of the search query itself while the most stupid mistakes occur in the website description - those descriptions are incredibly poorly translated and I can not even help Google by translating this or that description for websites for them.

By: Arda

Arda — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 11:37:11 +0000

Yes, it’s true that today machine translation doesnt work. Before when i just began to learn russian, i used babelfish service for couple of months, and the result was of course not good. But when i compared google with babelfish, I saw that babelfish is a little bit better.

Google says that they developed their own system, and they name it statistical machine translation. The interesting difference is that they allow people to submit their own suggested translations, when they see something wrong or missing. That’s some fresh hope, but requires good reviewing.

Another smilar solution is Prompt translator. From their site, I read that they wrote some technical dictionary, and with the help of that they translated MSDN information to russian with machine translation successfully. But of course need to test it

I downloaded and tested their desktop translation software. They have some nice features like integrated OCR, for recognizing the text from TIFF or other image documents, and translating it. And also have an icq add-on, which can be useful for people who only know english and want to communicate with other countries. And as I know, mail.ru also use their translation service.

Of course, today a machine translation service can not compete with human translations It’s quite hard to do this. Taxonomy, synonyms, idioms… it’s really hard.

But think that there is an english company making business with russia, when they receive a fax in russian from they customer, they can OCR it translate with machine translation and at least they can understand what the document is about, before they receive the translated document from translation office.

As i am working on the document management area, that example is quite interesting for me. At least a good marketing point

Regards

By: Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana Gladkova — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 06:51:48 +0000

Chaz, it is not actually criticism of Google at all, it is more of the fact that being a professional translator myself (with a number of full-time experience) I do not believe in machine translation. I do not believe in it at all and I will never start to believe in it only because Google can do it. Google is a giant and it can do almost anything, I know, but machine translation has never worked and I really doubt it will ever work. Correct translation takes a human translator. Google declares it has developed a superior translation engine but here is my proof that it does not work either. I do hope someone will find this service useful, maybe I just don’t see how - that is why I asked for comments. If you give me an example of how well you use the service yourself I will really be thankful. But I don’t believe in machine translation, no matter how prominent a company tries to implement it.

By: Chaz

Chaz — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:12:21 +0000

I’m constantly amazed at the criticism of any new endeavor by people who can’t do any better. Until you post the link to your vastly superior machine translation site, how about commenting on how the algorithm could be improved instead of saying “I am rather doubtful about possible use of the service”? Google didn’t even exist 10 years ago, and today most denizens of the web can’t imagine life without it. Was it as good when it first appeared as it is today? Uhhh, no…

They should, of course, have given up when they first created the search engine, because people were rather doubtful about the possible use of the service.

I’ll see you here again in ten years. Let’s see what the state of automated translation is then.

By: Pasquale

Pasquale — Mon, 28 May 2007 21:23:48 +0000

:))

By: Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana Gladkova — Mon, 28 May 2007 08:10:43 +0000

Pasquale,

Thanks a lot for your funny examples for Italian. I guess you helped me find at least one suitable purpose for the service - looking for new recipes in other languages. But taking into account my own rather limited cooking ability I really doubt I will ever need more examples than those listed in my own Russian language

By: Pasquale

Pasquale — Sat, 26 May 2007 04:09:54 +0000

Svetlana,

I tested my native language, Italian. Here is some example.
1. “mobili ufficio”, correct translation: “office furniture”, gives correct results. But when traslating “Home Office Furniture” to Italian, “Home Office” became the governmental body for national affairs.
2. “spaghetti al pomodoro”, correct translation: “spaghetti with tomato sauce”. You got a plenty of reasonable recipes. When translating in Italian, “Early Girls” referred to tomatoes, became a funny girls that are early. Or a “large pot” is translated with “grande POT”, (”big POT”), leaving POT in english. It sounds like a divinity

By: Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana Gladkova — Sat, 26 May 2007 01:46:06 +0000

Pasquale,

What language have you tried it with? I’m still trying to find opinions about other languages. Honestly, I could hardly understand what the documents were about when I looked through their translations into Russian. Only looking at their originals in English could help that is why I am rather doubtful about possible use of the service. Though you are very right - in some cases it is really funny

By: Pasquale

Pasquale — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:08:11 +0000

After reading your post, I tried Google Translate Beta.
In my opinion, even if the translator has some well known limitation, it will be useful for people that otherwise would search native language documents only. Possibly still a lot of people.
And in some case it is really funny

By: Svetlana Gladkova

Svetlana Gladkova — Fri, 25 May 2007 06:25:25 +0000

Yes, Google is known to omit rude words in their search. And surely, why would they need to develop a new translation algorithm when they already have one. The thing is that there is simply no reliable machine translation algorithm (too true for grammar-heavy languages) now and I really doubt there will ever be one.
Possibly it will work better for some e-shops when you are looking for a certain product (or product range) but when it comes to coherent descriptions there is no tool to work with it with any quality. Google is no exception here, to tell you the truth.
What I like about them is that they invite users to contribute their translations (if they have any) to the existing language pairs to improve the translation results. But the problem is only professional translators have large volumes of translated materials and originals but they simply can not disclose this materials in the majority of cases. So I can hardly imagine how these contributions will work.