Google adds automatic translation to some search results
Google adds link to selected automatically translated search results in Non-English versions of the search engine.
Google [NSDQ:GOOG] has spent millions on its translation program. You may think this is mainly to compete with other online machine translation services like Yahoo’s Babelfish. It is actually much more.
The goal is to make web pages in most languages available for searchers, regardless of their own first language. Hence if you use the Norwegian version of Google over at google.no, the search results may include a link to translated versions of Non-Norwegian web sites. This way Google will gain some satisfied users and even more pages on which to place ads.
There are only some 5 million people who speak and write Norwegian, which means that there are a limited number of web sites available in that language. Including translated sites in search results will widen the amount of information available for Norwegians.
(It is true that practically all Norwegians know English, but not all of them fluently. A Norwegian translation may come in handy, even for English language pages. Moreover, this options also gives you access to web pages written in other languages.)
Well, it seems that Google has decided that its machine translation has reached the level of quality needed for regular search result inclusion.
We did a search for the word “Lalonde” (Don’t ask!) using the Norwegian version of Google, and got a — to us — new link at the bottom of the search results announcing “Se oversatte resultater for Lalonde”, which means: “See translated results for Lalonde”.
We found similar links on other versions of Google, including the Danish, Swedish and Portuguese versions.
When clicking on this link we are presented with an alternative two column search result page: Original language search results to the right and Norwegian language versions of the same pages to the left.
Click on image for larger version!
Clicking on one of the translated links brings up an alternative version of the web page where the original language text is replaced with Google’s translation into Norwegian. The rest of the page is as the original: images, lay-out and formatting.
Google also includes a link at the top of the page (”Stemmer det ikke helt? Rediger!”, which means: “Is this not correct? Edit!”) which let’s you edit your search query.
These alternative two column pages are the same as you get if you use Google Translate’s Translated Search Form. That page let’s you select your own language and the language of the web pages you want to search for any search query.
The translated versions are far from perfect, but compared to automatic translations from a few years back, they are starting to become very palatable, indeed.
The Google translation project
Google started the machine translation project in 2003.
The goal was to develop translation software based on so-called statistical machine translation. This type of translation software compares non-translated versions of texts with translations made by humans in order to identify patterns that can be used for machine driven translations.
Google originally used United Nations documents to train its software. The system also analyzed stories indexed by Google News to recognize the natural phrasing of fluent English. The fact that Google probably has the largest search engine database in the world, gives the company a huge advantage when it comes to developing machine translation.
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Original post by Per and Susanne Koch