Interview: Lionbridge and IBM seek to expand “real time” translation
As readers of this blog well know, I’ve been bullish on machine translation for quite some time. Way back in 2004, I wrote: Note to translators: I’m not implying you’ll …
Machine Translation
Google, Bing and Babelfish: What’s the best translation engine?
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 …
When machine translation and volunteer translators collide: A YouTube/TED case study
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 …
Is Google the best machine translation engine? It depends…
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 …
What’s the best free machine translation engine?
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 …
Haitian Creole is now a machine translation staple
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 …
Google Translate: Now in 51 languages
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 …
Decyphering Google Translate on your web logs
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 …
Bing Beats Google in Insta-translation
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 …
Why Pay for Translation if You Can Get it for Free?
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 …
Have you dined at the Translate Server Error lately?
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 …
Google Translate graduates to the home page
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 …
Microsoft Translation Widget: Moving MT one step closer to the Web page
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 …
Google Translate your PDF files
Google Translate now handles PDF files — says the unofficial Google blog. I haven’t tried it yet. It looks like you have to post PDF files and then link to …
Google Translate now in 41 languages
Google marches ahead with its machine translation engine, adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician. This time last year, Google supported a mere 13 languages, which was in …