Google's New Translator Service

Google is reportedly now using their own machine translator technology on Google Translate which was previously provided by Systran, a provider of online translation, translation software, and tools. There are apparently still issues with both technologies - Systran translation used by Altavista and Yahoo, and Google translation.

I like that Google allows you to translate a word or a block of text, entire web pages, and search in other languages. What is also cool is when you translate text, it will give you the option to "Suggest a better translation" so it's almost self-learning or self-correcting. But the option to "Get Translation Browser Buttons" is just an option to add to favorites; I expected a Google Toolbar button add-on. The Yahoo translation tool limits you to 150 words for their text translation, you can search the web for translated text but you can't specify what language you want to search in; I guess by default it assumes you want to search in the language of the translated text. They do have the option to "Add Babel Fish to your Yahoo! Toolbar" and I like the "Add Babel Fish Translation to your site" widget where depending on which one you choose, you can have people localize your site on the fly.

The problem with all this is that these tools are machine translations without any human intervention and while neither methodology is error free, computer assisted translation is more exacting. However, translations are of natural-language and dependent on context and conventions and is not always as literal or word-for-word. Most larger companies with geo-specific sites are engaged in multi-lingual computing at some capacity. And as a result, most pay a pirate's booty for human translation services which is billed by the word. It would be great if these online translation technologies could be used initially followed by human intervention.