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 [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Machine Translation'
Is Google the best machine translation engine? It depends…
March 11th, 2010 · No Comments
Tags: Crowdsourcing · Google · Machine Translation · Microsoft
What’s the best free machine translation engine?
February 21st, 2010 · 1 Comment
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, [...]
Tags: Google · Machine Translation · Microsoft · Translation
Haitian Creole is now a machine translation staple
January 31st, 2010 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Machine Translation
Google Translate: Now in 51 languages
August 30th, 2009 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Google · Machine Translation · Translation
Decyphering Google Translate on your web logs
August 8th, 2009 · 2 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Google · Languages · Machine Translation · Multilingual search
Bing Beats Google in Insta-translation
June 15th, 2009 · 5 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Google · Languages · Machine Translation · Microsoft · Translation
Why Pay for Translation if You Can Get it for Free?
May 17th, 2009 · 5 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Crowdsourcing · Languages · Machine Translation · Translation · Web Globalization
Have you dined at the Translate Server Error lately?
May 8th, 2009 · 1 Comment
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 [...]
Tags: China · Machine Translation · Web Globalization
Google Translate graduates to the home page
March 25th, 2009 · 2 Comments
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. [...]
Tags: Google · Machine Translation
Microsoft Translation Widget: Moving MT one step closer to the Web page
March 19th, 2009 · 2 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Machine Translation · Microsoft

