Is Google soft-launching some of their own translation software?
As you may know, Google uses (used?) Systran for their translation software, as do quite a few other major players. Google has also been working on their own translation software. I won’t go into the details of that, but if you conduct translations on Google and Systran now, the results seem different.
So is Google testing out their own translation software without announcing it? When Google launches it officially, you can be sure that it’ll be a huge announcement. Anyone want to run some tests on different translators to uncover more information?
Thanks to DeWitt, for (sorta) being the first to notice this.
kats
October 10 2005, 5:03 pmAt the google infosession last week, one of the things they talked about was their translation software.. the guy there mentioned that they’ve been able to throw so much data at their software’s learning algorithm that it now beats out all other translation software. Apparently there’s some translation contest that’s held every year and they won in all the categories. So yeah, it might be that they now consider their translation software da bomb! and ready to be rolled out.
Also, your DeWitt link is broken (extra quote mark from the looks of it).
mfagan
October 11 2005, 9:10 amit’s true, they won in all categories. although the scores are self-reported. see http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/mt/mt05eval_official_results_release_20050801_v3.html
even if this is a rollout of their own translation software, it’s not complete. I don’t see Arabic on their translation page at all… although I haven’t tried hacking the urls yet
Mattt
October 15 2005, 11:16 pmArabic? That sounds like terrorist talk to me, Mike. Are you against Freedom? Why don’t you and John Kerry take your communist loving translation software and go find some other country to ruin?
Fred
October 16 2005, 9:58 pmIt looks like the Google Version of Japanese-English Translation is fooled by variety of Japanese Text that works fine with
Excel.co.jp (Fujitsu Ltd OEM)
Yahoo.co.jp/honyahku (systran)
Any clue what is going on? Gievn that MT is very different than translation who do you suggest is working with google on this?
Is it possible that they have Japanese Subconractor (maybe someone like Fujitsu that has a 20% leading share of the Japanese Market) ?
mfagan
October 16 2005, 10:34 pmI figure google is/has moved all language translation to their own software, but of course I could be wrong
thanks for the info though
mara
November 12 2005, 1:15 pmfiecare om are dreptul la viata
toti oamenii sunt egali in drepturi
libertatea este atunci cand poti face orice lucru care nu ii deranjezi pe ceilalti
wolfgang
November 24 2005, 2:22 pmGoogle hired one of the most famous MT experts, Franz-Josef Och (he was at RWTH Aachen before). They are working on statistical machine translation SMT. One of Google’s strong point in it is that they have massive computer power. For SMT to work, you need a lot of parallel text (source and translation) to train the engine. Note that the NIST score probably favours SMT in comparison to rule based systems like Systran (RBMT).
mfagan
November 24 2005, 2:27 pmInteresting. The whole idea of using anything other than humans to compare the quality of translations seems flawed to me..
Jaak Henno
December 12 2005, 2:02 pmA rather classical test of MT systems is double translation, e.g. english-german-back to english; with Google website this is very easy to implement, two-way translation is provided for all languages. In the following are results of copy-paste two-way translations from a sentence from the same page http://www.google.com/language_tools (only European languages were used) - can you tell what was the original sentence?
english-language1-english:
Adjust the homepage Google, the announcements and the keys to announcement in your preselected language over our preference side.
english-language2-english:
Rules the homepage of Google, the messages and the keys to exposure in your language selected via our page of preferences.
english-language3-english:
Fix the homepage of Google, the messages, and the bellboys to the exhibition in its language selected via our page of the preferences.
So - “Adjust the homepage Google, the messages and the bellboys to the exhibition in its language selected via our page of preferences”. Clear?
nunzio
December 26 2005, 4:25 pmGoogle Sprachtool – Test 1
Testsatz: „Es war so schön mit dir. Wann werden wir uns wiedersehen?“
Die Übersetzung: “It was with you when we will so beautifully see itself again?“
Die Gegenprobe: „Es war mit Ihnen, wenn wir so schön uns wieder sehen?“
8 mistakes in one sentence, wow!
justine
December 26 2005, 4:29 pmLink Tip
http://dict.leo.org/
Steven
June 1 2006, 7:34 pmthe way the new translators are set up they dont go word for word but rather phrase by phrase to get better accuracy….correct?
It seems google is flexing its muscles and is in early stages of taking the phrase by phrase over the top with some intense compilation.
My guess is the want to be capable of translating entire websites instantly and fluently which would unite the whole world to all the info on the internet and not just whats in your language.