Global by Design

Two months ago I wrote about an effort to evaluate the quality of the three major free machine translation (MT) engines: Google Translate Bing (Microsoft) Translator Yahoo! Babelfish Ethan Shen has wrapped up the project, soliciting input from more than 1,000 reviewers. He summed up his findings here. Here are the findings that jumped 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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After more than a year at Microsoft, I have decided to return to Byte Level Research. It was a tough decision to make. I enjoyed working with the many people who are passionate about globalization. And I enjoyed being a part of one of the most global companies on the planet. But the time was [...]

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Firefox 3.5 is now out and available in more than 70 languages. Yes, 70 languages. Naturally, I was curious to learn how many languages the other browsers currently support. Here is a rough list: Internet Explorer 8: 63 languages Chrome: 63 languages Opera 9.6: 36 languages Safari 4: 16 languages I say “rough” because I [...]

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