Google's Translation Wins Hands Down

[amitbhandari 0]

In August 2005, in a US government -run test, Google's translation application beat technology from IBM and from various universities. In the test, Google scored the highest amongst all competing software in Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests; these wereconducted by NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology). Each test comprised the task of translating hundreds of articles from Agence France Presse and the Chinese Xinhua News Agency from December 2004 to January 2005.

 

How Google Wins?

The answer lies in statistical analysis. It now seems increasingly likely that rather than have a system try to understand a piece of text, or formulate abstract representation taking context and other things into account, the most promising method involves looking at ready translations. How this works is that system would look at exisiting translations, and be trained on those. For example, if the German "reich" is often seen as being translated as "rich" in context of money, the system would pick it up.

 

This means that the more the number of documents in the source and target languages available, the better the system would get at translating. And, of course, Google has a very large store of documents in various languages.

 

All this means is that the Google team have trained their system to the extreme than the engines available from other vendors. However, it may be possible that the engine of some other university or even IBM is better than Google's engine but due to the extensive training at Google, it wins again.

 

Online translation sites

 

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ - Reasonably good; one of the oldest existing tools

https://translate.google.com/ - Probably the best out there

http://yahoo.com/ - Quirky. Sometimes OK, sometimes pathetic

http://www.linguatec.net/ - Has an excellent feature: subject area selection for more accurate translation. Works better for German translations

http://translation2.paralink.com/ - Not so good at translation

http://www.reverso.net/text_translation.aspx?lang=EN - Very bad at translation

 

[becibear 0]

The one thing I know about webpage translation apps, is that they all seem to have problems translating Chinese, Japanese and Russian into English. You try to translate an e-mail address and end up being told that the user's domain is holding a steering wheel (due to the @ symbol -> user@domain.etc). It's pretty funny, but gets a bit boring after reading it too many times in one day. I visit a lot of Japanese sites and think it'd be easier to just learn to read the language myself!Rebecca x

[Jeigh1405241495 0]

I remember back in high school using bablefish for my french projects I wish we would have had actual GOOD translation websites back then hahaha. Stupid babelfish...I'll have to keep this one in mind next time I'm chatting with my friends from different countries. Usually they just fight through using English but it'll be nice to throw some of their native tongue at them once in awhile (assuming it works well) heh.

[Alegis 0]

I'll add 2 to the list I've used before.

These sites are good at translation of phrases, and quite accurate if you only wish to translate a word.

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

https://www.freetranslation.com/

Most websites do struggle with chinese/russian. The weird structure, strange characteristics aren't really easy to automate

[Chesso 0]

Google is pretty good but Babelfish if I remember correctly has more options. I'm not entirely sure on that but I remember needing to use Babelfish as opposed to Google and such because of it.Otherwise i'd say Google is better.

[cyborgxxi 0]

Wow, Google's translation tools & services? I have seriously never ever heard of that until now... I mean, wow! Google is like dominating everything! Seriously!! Until now, I only knew of Babelfish.com & TranslateThis.com as my translation services & tools. Well, then I get told that Google has a translation service and they're owning everyone in the market... I mean in the field lol!!!Jeeez my goodness, do you guys know what's going on here? Google is like dominating! Owning!! Beating everyone else's arses!!!! My gosh... I have so much respect for Google man. Microsoft and Yahoo may be like "those stupid Google buttholes go burn in hell" but hehe, Microsoft and Yahoo, you have to hire better workers or something.Google is like setting the modern stuff for everything now.. they're just beating you bad. I heard Yahoo's stock thing is gone down to a one-digit number while Google's is like a three-digit number.Hmm... I gotta really start on investing in the stocks... getting into stock market. Anyone else done trading & buying and selling stocks before?

[Arbitrary 0]

I thought the Google translation service was pretty good for languages similar to English (French, German, etc), but it didn't work so well for Chinese and Japanese. I tried with Chinese and there were lots of problems with the grammar and word usage. As for the French one, I use that often on French projects. It does have a number of errors (at least according to my French teacher), but it's a lot better than me writing it.

Jeeez my goodness, do you guys know what's going on here? Google is like dominating! Owning!! Beating everyone else's arses!!!! My gosh... I have so much respect for Google man. Microsoft and Yahoo may be like "those stupid Google buttholes go burn in hell" but hehe, Microsoft and Yahoo, you have to hire better workers or something.

Well, I wouldn't say Google is the best in terms of everything (like what about their SpreadSheets?), but their translation services are quite nice. And I suppose one day when Google dominates the market the way Microsoft holds its iron grip, we'll all hate it just as much as we hate Microsoft.

[kaputnik 0]

I remember back in high school using bablefish for my french projects I wish we would have had actual GOOD translation websites back then hahaha. Stupid babelfish...
I'll have to keep this one in mind next time I'm chatting with my friends from different countries. Usually they just fight through using English but it'll be nice to throw some of their native tongue at them once in awhile (assuming it works well) heh.

There was a point in tie when bablefish was the only thing I used. Never did quite get my meaning across to a whole bunch of people because of the poor translation. The reason for the low quality I believe is because they wanted people to actually get fed-up with the 'free' service and actually get down to using the premium service - which may (I cant say for sure) have been a lot better.

Now however with Google dishing out a service that actually gets the job done better than (and I'm stating this from the reviews posted here) other competing software, we may ave something to look out for. Even though Google has been growing at a phenomanally high rate, the mindset of the organization as a whole has been to base t's revenue model on text ads, so I really do hope that they keep up with all the research and come out with a bunch of exciting software - and keep it free. what I'm really hoping they do is come out with a kickass OS - free of cost, a little simpler thatn Linux as far as installing apps are concerned and a whole bunch safer.

[vhortex 1]

Even though Google has been growing at a phenomanally high rate, the mindset of the organization as a whole has been to base t's revenue model on text ads, so I really do hope that they keep up with all the research and come out with a bunch of exciting software - and keep it free. what I'm really hoping they do is come out with a kickass OS - free of cost, a little simpler thatn Linux as far as installing apps are concerned and a whole bunch safer.

i wish they will develop an OS compatible with windows but free and text ads. So i can throw away this Windows system.. Upgrading to newer versions of windows cost me much more money and eats up the bills i need to pay each year.

[evion 0]

I have to agree, Google's Translation tools has been the most accurate AND free translating machine I've ever used. I am a Chinese myself and there has been only a few errors here and there, maybe a little grammatical mistakes because Chinese grammar is almost the total opposite of English. I also remember back a few years ago, Lycos, or was it Alta Vista had a similar engine for translation whole web pages, i tried that before with Japanese, i ended up with the weirdest messed up webpage I've ever seen plus garbage in English. I never used it again .

[Barako 0]

Hmm, I guess Google's translations are better than Babelfish... but that still doesn't stop it from coming up with rather goofy translations on a regular basis. It's great entertainment to translate something from English to German and back... the translation errors are hilarious. I think the main reason that Google's translations aren't that great is that, of course, they're not being translated by a real live human being who has full comprehension of both languages. I'm pretty sure that language translation software will never be as good as a human translator.

[doudou 0]

My experience with Google translation is limited to the translation on individual words when my mouse is pointing at a specific word. So far it seems pretty accurate surprisingly even in Chinese. But I’ve not tried using it to translate a whole sentence so don’t know if grammar will also be accurate.

[evought 0]

In August 2005, in a US government -run test, Google's translation application beat technology from IBM and from various universities. In the test, Google scored the highest amongst all competing software in Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests; these wereconducted by NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology). Each test comprised the task of translating hundreds of articles from Agence France Presse and the Chinese Xinhua News Agency from December 2004 to January 2005.

 

How Google Wins?

The answer lies in statistical analysis. It now seems increasingly likely that rather than have a system try to understand a piece of text, or formulate abstract representation taking context and other things into account, the most promising method involves looking at ready translations. How this works is that system would look at exisiting translations, and be trained on those. For example, if the German "reich" is often seen as being translated as "rich" in context of money, the system would pick it up.

 

<snip>

 

This is an improvement, but there is still a long way to go with translation systems. Most text simply cannot be accurately translated word-for-word. Worse, as translational systems get better, they will *look* like they are accurate but not be.

 

Most language is not made of words but of rules, idioms and phrases. If you know the rules, idioms and phrases of a particular language, you can understand the text even if the actual words are encoded (look at cypher-solving problem like Treasure Island, etc.). Conversely, if you can translate the words 99% accurately but do not know the rules, idioms, and phrases, you cannot understand the text.

 

As a simple example, Spanish allows double negatives: "No, no nunca voy" (I don't go ever, (I think)). Translating it word for word gives a worng or at least ambiguous meaning in English, and that is a simple example. Without translating more than one word at a time, you cannot do it right. In translating a web page or a news article, this may not be important. In academic papers (which is where I have needed it most), the ambiguity can be lethal (did that mean to mix in the HCL first always or never?). There were many times in college where you can not even get the sense of an article from its "translation".

 

One good test of a translation system is to translate to a language and then back. You get some really funny translations, which is of course the source of the "invisible idiot" ("out of sight, out of mind") puzzles.