TechGist05

This is a continuation of this posting . 2.                    Is Google Right For The Professional Language Services Industry? For more than 40 years, machine translation has promised much but consistently failed to deliver. MT promises had come to be seen more as “empty promises”. In recent years, for enterprises and language service providers who want control of the translation, Google’s machine translation has been an eye-opener for many but still not a real solution to their requirements. Before Google launched its own SMT translation technology in October 2007, Google used Systran, as Yahoo Babelfish still does today. The measure of machine translation in the public eye was Systran technology, even if the public did not know the name of the technology behind the free translation services. Today that measure has moved to Google, with a common perception that Google is the state-of-the-art in machi...

This is a post further exploring the Google API announcements by guest writer Dion Wiggins, CEO of Asia Online (dion.wiggins@asiaonline.net) and former Gartner Vice President and Research Director. The opinions and analysis are those of the author alone. Overview This is Part II of the posting that was posted on June 1, 2011 .  Part I detailed the reasons behind the Google announcement that it will shut down access to the Google Translate API completely on December 1, 2011, and reduce capacity prior to the shutdown. Part II which will be released as two posts, analyzes the impact that the announcement will have on the professional language services industry and also explores the implications of Google charging for it's MT services. Summary Humans will be involved in delivering quality language translation for the foreseeable future. The ability to understand context, language and nuance is beyond the capabilities of any machine today. If machine translation ever becomes perfect, t...