The Seach Engine Giant enters the World of Human Translation
Google can barely blink without making headlines, and its recent launch of Google Translation Center is no exception. The Center aims to match translation customers with professional and volunteer translators in 40 languages.
Why would Google, a company not know for its human-powered solutions, want to take on this role? Some have suggested — because the results will be stored on Google’s servers — it is an effort to feed their statistical machine translation tool, Google Translate, with corpora of words in language pairs in which they are currently poorly stocked. If this is true, Google is essentially building the Translation Center’s future obsolescence into its much grander plan of seamless international seach capabilities.
Who will be translating? Well, in its appeal to get translators involved in the new service, Google asks, “Passionate about bringing content into your language? Implication: some translators will work simply based on their desire to make information accessible to other speakers of their language. Other translators will work for pay.
Whether fueled by passion or a paycheck, translators will log on to the service and respond to requests from people who have uploaded a document for translation. All negotiation will then take place between the customer and the translator. And Google will ensure neither quality in one direction or payment in the other. Google will provide its translation tools however, which will include databases of Translation Memory.
As with machine translation in general, dire predictions of upheaval in the translation industry have accompanied the launch. Some say the first victims will be translation agencies, whose most appreciated (and most scorned) role is that of middleman (although some of us would argue our services go far beyond this). Then, as gaps are closed in machine translation quality by a company with Google’s power and scope, human translators will soon follow.
A question for customers and translators alike: does the Google Translation Center sound like a step forward in the translation industry? Will you try it? Why or why not?
For more information, see here, here, here, and here.
6 responses so far ↓
1 Ryan Ginstrom // Aug 8, 2008 at 6:26 pm
I’ll be watching with interest, but won’t be participating. I expect customers on that site to be expecting quick and dirty translations, super fast and super cheap. Essentially people used to machine-translation speeds and not paying for anything figuring “Yeah, I’ll pay $20 for my 5,000-word nuclear physics translation, due tomorrow morning.” No thanks.
2 Masked Translator // Aug 9, 2008 at 6:13 pm
I was reading about the Google service on CNET.com recently, as well. It reminded me of a story: I had a client several years ago who approached me to do some QA on some translations they had had done for a telecommunications service they were trying to internationalize. After an hour or two with the material, I got suspicious and then asked and got my worst fear confirmed: the company had run their text strings through a free online translation service (like Babelfish or whatever) thinking in all seriousness that the translations would be fine. I refused to continue my project, informing them that they were wasting their time and money having me do this and not just have the translations done professionally, fresh.
That company went out of business a few years ago, incidentally.
Basically, the Google service in the short term will appeal to ignoramuses and cheapskates; in the long term, it will train whole legions of businesspeople that human, professional translators are the only way to go when your reputation and livelihood are on the line. Many reputations and livelihoods will be destroyed before that point is reached, but translators should sleep well, secure in the knowledge that their jobs are safe.
3 Amir Helzer // Aug 11, 2008 at 1:58 pm
I’m not 100% sure that Google is trying to shake the translation industry.
Google’s business is selling ads. The more contents, the more ads, the more money for them. So, they’re just facilitating things a bit. I guess that they prefer mediocre human translation over machine translation or no translation at all.
http://blog-en.icanlocalize.com/2008/08/google-makes-human-translation-a-commodity/
Amir
4 Glenn // Aug 11, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Ryan,
I’m sure you’re right that Google’s service will skim off just those clients looking for passable and cheap translations — usually better than machine.
Masked,
It would be great to think that Google’s service will serve as just one more lesson to customers that good translators are experienced professionals, and experienced professionals will not work at the rates many of Google’s translators will be asking. But translation will always be one of those professions where client education is a bit more complicated in my view. Even before the competition of machine translation, translators were often considered a more fungible resource than many other professions, mainly because people don’t know what’s involved.
Amir,
I agree that Google’s business is selling ads and that they likely have not given much thought to entering the translation market, yet they may have a big impact on that market. But many of their efforts don’t result in immediate pay-offs in ad revenue. I think the Translation Center and Google Translate are in the short- and medium-term a part of ensuring they continue to dominate the internet as it continues to tear down borders between languages and countries.
I’ll be interested to see the response and impact as more people use it.
Thanks for reading!
Glenn
5 Amir Helzer // Aug 12, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Glenn,
it’s the first time in a long time I see anything remotely related to translation hitting the web news. Now, when you search for “google translation center” (with the quotes), you find 685,000 results.
Pretty impressive considering it’s been about a week since it was pre-pre-announced.
Amir
6 Glenn // Aug 12, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Amir,
You’re right. That’s the power of Google. The same was recently discussed with regard to Knol (http://knol.google.com/k#), Google’s free encyclopedia, which is getting higher ranking than Wikipedia for many searches despite the fact it just came out — leading many to question whether Google is tweaking its secret algorithms to favor itself over the competition.
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