Automated page translation with Google

[janderson]

Hasan Aljudy wrote:
> 
> 
> Jan Claeys wrote:
>> Op Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:46:24 -0700
>> schreef Walter Bright <newshound at digitalmars.com>:
>>
>>> Hasan Aljudy wrote:
>>
>>>> I don't think it's google that wrote the translation engines ..
>>>> it's probably some other company's 30+ years of work!  
>>> You're right they bought it. But I think they'll continue to improve
>>> it, because doing it better can be worth enormous money.
>>
>> The Systran software they have licensed (not bought AFAIK) hasn't
>> improved in any obvious way since the first time I used it something
>> like 10 years ago...
>>
>> It's often usable if you want to get an impression of what a page talks
>> about, but IMHO technical documentation requires accuracy.
>>
>> E.g., something like "Objets de classe d'Instantiating ailleurs que le
>> tas de CHROMATOGRAPHIE GAZEUSE" is complete nonsense if you are
>> talking about D.   ;-)
>>
>>
> 
> Actually I was looking up "free statistical translation" (or something 
> like that) in Google, when I discovered a Google Blog entry stating that 
> Google now uses a statistical model for translating Arabic and Chinese 
> (I think all languages labeled BETA use that model now)
> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/04/statistical-machine-translation-live.html 
> 
> 
> and, interestingly enough, you can now "suggest a better translation" 
> for any piece of text that Google translates! I'm guessing it goes 
> through some sort of filtering mechanism then gets passed to the 
> statistical engine.
> 
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/suggest-better-translation.html

This is cool.  Perhaps someone will summit better translated D pages. 
Then with small changes hopefully the translation would stay reasonably 
decent.

> 
> I've found that translating news articles from Arabic to English gives 
> very good results ..
> However, translating technical articles from English to Arabic gives the 
> crappiest results!! I guess it all depends on what they feed the 
> statistical engine.
> 
> Try it on aljazeera.net or something .. I think you'll be amazed; I was. 
> I never thought there'd be any hope for "reasonable" machine translation 
> involving Arabic, and I happily admit that I've been proved wrong!