Google Translate was featured this week in the Technology section of the New York Times. The article examines the endless possibilities and the impressive manpower and resources that Google and its Translate service has. In particular, Google has some interesting new features in the works, like translating auto-generated captions on Youtube videos, voice-to-voice translations for mobile phones running Google's Android OS, and taking pictures of non-English menus and getting it translated instantly.
All this technology is exciting and interesting, but the article glances over the disadvantages and shortcomings of machine translation. There's no denying the fact that Google Translate is getting better, but the accuracy and reliability of its translations still have a long ways to go. The article also features an interesting compare-and-contrast graphic of translations by Google Translate, human translators and other machine translation tools, but it's curious that Chinese, the most ubiquitous language, and Japanese, the language of the world's second largest economy, isn't used as examples (And let's not forget that English into and from Japanese/Chinese are notorious for generating some amusing translation results).
The article also portrays the industry with human translators on one end of the spectrum and automated machine translation tools on the other. It doesn't mention the new trends emerging in the middle, which (I think at least) is a lot more interesting and intriguing.
For more information check out:
"Google's Toolkit for translators helps feed its machine" on Bits Blog
"Google Chrome Translator vs. Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Babel Fish" on PC World
"Need a translation? Google awaits your call" on LA Times
"Franz Josef Och, Google's translation uber-scientist, talks about Google Translate" on LA Times
"Show and Translate YouTube Captions" on Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
