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25 May 2007
Google has launched its Google Translate feature that allows non-English speakers to search content from the English web.
The company showed off the technology earlier this month at a company event at its corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California. But the search giant did not provide a projected launch date.
Google Translate supports 12 languages including Arabic, Chinese, French and German. Users enter queries in their native tongues, Google performs the search for the English equivalent and presents the user with translated search results.
Users clicking on a search result will be guided to a machine-translated version of the original page.
A search for the French word 'bistro', for instance, yields bar.co.uk as the top result.
However, in a demonstration of the challenges ahead for machine translation the second result is a Wikipedia entry on air pressure, which is measured in 'bars'.
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Flunked!
OK, so I went looking for my local railway company, just for fun - and I got it, too. I typed in ????, told it I was using English but wanted results in Japanese, and it duly presented, among others, the home page of the Kobe Electric Railway, in, er, English. Fine. But wait - what's this "god-iron" thing? Then the penny dropped. The abbreviation for the line is ??, the first and the last characters above - but it's untranslatable, and should be read phonetically as Shintetsu (the "shin" is the first character in "Kobe Dentetsu", usually "shin" or "kami", but in the city's name "kou" - uh-oh). Then, what's all this "Mita" business? Dropping of pennies again - one of the termini is in Sanda (??), but unfortunately, if you go to Tokyo, the same characters are, equally reasonably, read as "Mita". How does one resolve such issues in Japanese? Easy - one just has to KNOW, because the text won't tell you unless you do know. (And yes, the Japanese do regularly get things wrong, only just not as often as I do.) Back to the drawing-board, methinks. I did try to find out how to tell Google, but it got too difficult, so I gave up. They'll never fix it in a month of Sundays anyway.
Posted by: Michael Poole 30 May 2007