With minor revisions, 25/5/2009
I've occasionally written about machine translation, the quality of which has improved greatly in the last few years, along with an increase in the number of language pairs between which machine translation can be made. (There are some links below.)
Between 2004 and 2006 I was involved in a transnational trade union education project, and I can remember speculating with someone during an early morning run along a beach in Portugal that sooner or later Google would introduce a feature to Gmail which enabled users without any language in common to sit at opposite ends of a communication, each reading and writing in their own language.
On 19 May, Google announced that Gmail now provides this; and a user can activate it through the "Settings" and "Labs" tabs, then scrolling down and activating "Message translation". I think the arrival of this feature is very significant.
I've tested it superficially, and it works pretty well. To judge the feature's utility properly you would need to have several rounds of an email exchange relying entirely on machine translation. Anyone who is a Gmail user with the feature activated, who wants to email me in a language other than English is welcome to do so in order to test this out a bit more.
Links to previous posts on this subject:
- 12 June 2005 - Combining human with machine translation;
- 24 January 2006 - Machine translation;
- 24 November 2006 - The November 2006 (and June 2008) NIST results;
- 26 April 2008 - Machine translation - a crude comparison - statistical method superior to rules-based?;
- 30 September 2008 - Google launches eleven more languages at translate.google.com.
With thanks to Dick Moore for highlighting the announcement to me.
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