Global by Design

Google recently announced a rather nifty feature in YouTube: Auto-translation of auto-generated video captions. So not only is Google automatically transcribing the text of its videos, it’s also providing translations — via machine translation. Now I just need a “machine reader” so I can process all of this new content — as I’m running out [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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