Google Creates Gadget That Allows Instant Website Translation
October 1st, 2009 9:19 AM | by Steve Anderson | 1 Comment
If you love surfing the websites of foreign countries but find it too much of a hassle to learn to speak their language first, then you’ll love what Google’s about to do for you. They’ve issued free software that allows website operators to automatically translate online pages into any of 51 languages.
It’s called the “translator gadget”, and it will automatically shift the language on the page to match the default browser’s language. Let’s say that I’m a guy from somewhere near Iran, and my browser’s set to Farsi. I surf on over to Craigslist to look for a job writing for a fashion magazine, and they’ve got the gadget installed, and boom! Suddenly Craigslist is coming to me live in Farsi.
Granted, the system isn’t foolproof. As everyone who’s surfed Engrish.com knows, translation isn’t always an exact science, especially for software. But still, those occasional errors should at least be entertaining!
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Adding this semi-automatic translation is an interesting feature, but how does the translation actually read to a speaker of that language?
Presumably the translation is handled by the same engine as Google Translate. I recently blogged about this kind of machine translation at “Making Sense” (worldaccent.com/blog) and, more importantly, its dangers. It can be great for getting the gist of something, but is also often way off beam. Google state this quite openly, but it’s worth thinking over.
If a user runs your website through Google translate, they know its at their own risk. If you have “provided” a translation, aren’t you more responsible for what it says? As Bing Translator warns you every time you use it: “Automatic translation can help you understand the gist of the translated text but is no substitute for a professional human translator.”
And, unless you speak the target language, how do you know if your website is being rendered in perfect prose or as unintelligible gibberish? If you care about what “you” are saying in translation, you’re still best off sticking to a human translator.