Google asks users to tweak translations

 

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By Matt Whipp

Posted on 5 Mar 2007 at 11:53

Google is hoping to iron out translation hiccups by throwing the weight of its massive userbase at the problem.

While many translation tools, such as Babelfish and Google's translate.google.com, make a decent enough go at translating a passage of text for the reader to extract the overall meaning, it is rare that any read as if written in the target language.

Google is hoping to smooth the path to fluent translations by giving its users a tool to suggest a better translation where they happen upon a problem.

The user can hover their cursor over the problem area and Google will surface the original text tooltip with a link to 'Suggest a better translation'.

This gets fed back into the system to benefit all Google users, and improving the overall translation capabilities with time.

It is currently implemented for a limited range of language pairs which have been developed by the Google research group. They are English to/from Arabic, English to/from Chinese (Simplified/Traditional), English to/from Russian, and Chinese (Simplified) to/from Chinese (Traditional).

For more information visit, translate.google.com.