Global by Design

Two weeks ago, I introduced Ethan Shen and his project to analyze the three major free machine translation (MT) engines — Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Babelfish — by relying on translator reviews.
Ethan has provided me with a mid-point summary of results, which I’ve included below. I was surprised to find that Microsoft and Babelfish are [...]

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Google Translate is the first place I turn for free machine translation (MT), mostly because it supports the greatest number of language pairs. I use Microsoft Translator as well, but usually only when I want to compare engines. I haven’t used Babel Fish in years.
But which engine offers the highest quality translations? I’m assuming Google, [...]

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In response to the earthquake in Haiti, Microsoft quickly expanded its machine translation engine to include Haitian Creole.
Today I noticed that Google has an alpha version of its Haitian Creole engine as well.
Though it’s sad that it took a natural disaster to spur attention to a particular language, I’m glad to see the language available.
It’s [...]

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In February of this year, Google Translate surpassed 40 languages.
Six months later, Google added ten more languages, a two-year growth trajectory illustrated below:

Google went from 13 languages to 51 languages in less than 16 months.
Not bad.
And, yes, I’m aware that we must not confuse quantity of translations with quality of translations. Your translation mileage will [...]

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Whenever I read this site’s web logs, I’m always fascinated by the number of referrals via Google Translate.
Every month there seems to be more of them, which could mean that the quality of Google Translate is improving, or this site is doing better in the rankings, or some combination of the two. Or, it could [...]

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Bing recently added a nifty new translation feature — one that is so simple and in many ways so obvious that I can’t help wondering why Google never got around to doing it. But that’s a topic for a later post.
For now, I’d like you to try entering the following text strings into both Bing [...]

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It was nice to wake up this morning and see this article in the New York Times about the emergence of machine translation and volunteer translation (aka crowdsourcing). These are two very important developments that every companies needs to be aware of — and possibly champion.
That said, I do wonder how this article is going [...]

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File this post under Lost in (Machine) Translation.

This photo arrived courtesy of Gareth Morgan at Neovia Financial.
Apparently the proprietor of this restaurant in China decided to create an English-language sign using machine translation (MT) software and, apparently, the MT engine wasn’t working all that well.
So instead of “restaurant” we have “translate server error.”
It’s certainly one [...]

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Only a few days after Microsoft announces a widget to bring machine translation into your Web site’s home page, Google takes a step towards integrating machine translation into its home page.
According to the unofficial Google blog, Google has inserted its “translate” link into a number of localized Google sites — such as France and Spain. [...]

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I’m happy to see Microsoft Research launch this new Web site widget.
I’ll have to test it out on my site when I get the time — and would love to hear from others who have tried it.
A demo site is here.
I really like how the widget creates a more seamless translation experience, which is a [...]

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