Google’s CAT tool is out of the bag

A little bit less than a year ago, I started seeing hints that Google was planning to develop a computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool of its own for use by human translators. I posted a link to one such article then, but have been waiting ever since to see what Google would come up with. As of this week, that wait is over. Google Translator Toolkit is now available to the public.

For anyone who is familiar with traditional CAT tools, Google Translator Toolkit will seem very familiar in terms of what it does, but how it does it is somewhat different from what you may be accustomed to in a CAT tool. The most significant difference is that Google automatically applies its own good-enough-for-gisting-purposes machine translation system to the source document, and then offers the results to the user for additional finessing.

This being a Google app, naturally the team that produced Google Translator Toolkit has prepared a short video describing what it does:

For the time being, Google Translator Toolkit is only available for translating English-language content into a number of other languages (namely these), but presumably the number of source languages it can handle will increase sometime soon. As a matter of professionalism, I generally avoid translating into languages I do not speak natively, so I will not attempt to write a review of Google Translator Toolkit at this point, but merely out of curiosity, I did try it out, using the About page of the SWET site as an example (click image to enlarge):

As you can see, Google’s machine translation contains a lot of obvious errors, but not all of it is entirely unusable. Better still, machine translations are only used if there are no matching translations provided by a human being, so assuming Google can get enough input from human translators, the quality of the matches should improve as well. Will Google actually be able to do that, though? That’s what everyone wants to know. Even at this early stage, it is clear that Google Translator Toolkit offers many of the features that a good CAT tool requires, but it also requires its users to trust Google with the content of whatever they are translating, which rules out using Google Translator Toolkit for anything confidential (which means most paid translation work).

What happens next is anyone’s guess, but the CAT’s out of the bag now. Look for updates in this space as Google Translator Toolkit matures.

Posted by S. Patrick Eaton on 06/10 at 10:02 PM

Comments

  1. I tried using Google Language Tools (the automated translator at http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en, and found it lacking. The tool assumes that the same concepts are used to express the same thought across languages. Of the languages I know, this is least true of Japanese, less true of Chinese, and even not totally true of French, all translated to or from English. Don’t worry. Translators will have work for a long time to come.

    http://alanthwaits.com

    Posted by Alan Thwaits on 06/12 at 08:51 AM
    2. Page 1 of 1 pages

Please note that, as a spam-prevention measure, all comments from users who have not registered will be held for moderation and will not appear on this site until they have been approved. Comments from registered users are not moderated. Registration is easy and free of charge (although it does not confer the same benefits as membership in SWET).

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below:


Next entry: Beware of the Piranhas

Previous entry: Drifting down the Amazon

<< Back to main