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| ronan.dorvillers |
 Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2009 8:39 am |
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Joined: 14 Jan 2009
Posts: 4
Location: UK
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With the internet behemoth Google entering the translation field with its translation toolkit (http://translate.google.com/toolkit), I was wondering what people thought of what this development means for the translation and localization community.
In brief, the Google Toolkit allows people to upload their English source files (HTM/DOC/RTF) to Google’s servers and use the Translation Memories hosted by Google to translate and work on the file.
These TM can be either your own that you have imported, or, more importantly, some global shared TM made up from other people’s translations. Once your translation is completed, you can also add your work to the corpus of this shared TM.
To complicate things further, Google aims to assist the translation by doing a Machine Translation which the person translating can then amend as required.
Google’s system is only a couple of months old and I am sure some improvements will come but how do you see this system of globally shared TM, where the quality could be dubious (indeed some might be straight Machine Translation) or out of context having an impact on our industry? |
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Ronan Dorvillers, Project Manager
Rubric Europe Ltd.
12 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AX, Scotland
Tel: +44 (0)7941 251301
Fax: +44 (0)870 330 5890
ronan.dorvillers@rubric.com
http://www.rubric.com |
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| Scott Norel-Wilson |
| Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2009 2:03 pm |
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Joined: 14 Jan 2009
Posts: 5
Location: Edinburgh
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I had a look at the short video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7W2NJFdoIg) explaining basically how the toolkit works.
One thing that I noticed is that once the machine translation has taken place, translated strings can be replaced with other translators' interpretations.
In my opinion this could cause some problems with quality and style, especially if the translator using the toolkit decides to "import" strings from multiple translators. While I think it would be useful to compare your work to that of others, I think it also has the potential to make the translation quite hard to read.
[b]Back on Ronan's question about the tool's effect on our industry:[/b]
For now I think it has as much effect as most other machine translation tools. Yes, it has more functionality than others but this young toolkit doesn't offer much more than the others in terms of translations.
Their current plan seems to be useful in that people can share and compare glossaries, but Google being Google will probably develop this toolkit and I think that with further development, and future developed features, Google may decide to branch out into translation and introduce the toolkit at a cost to compete with other CAT companies.
[i]My $0.02...[/i] |
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