This is an interesting move, and it has broad implications for the translation industry, which up until now has been fragmented and somewhat behind the times, from a technology standpoint
Google Translation Center is a straightforward and very clever way to gather a large corpus of parallel texts to train its machine translation systems.
If Google releases an API for the translation management system, it could establish a de facto standard for integrated machine translation and translation memory, creating a language platform around which projects like Der Mundo can build specialized applications and collect more training data.
On the other hand, GTC could be bad news for translation service bureaus — especially those that use proprietary translation management systems as a way to hold customers and translators hostage.
For freelancers, GTC could be very good news; they could work directly with clients and have access to high quality productivity tools. Overall this is a welcome move that will force service providers to focus on quality, while Google, which is competent at software, can focus on building tools.
my guess is Google will make this a free tool for the translation industry to use, and it will figure the money part out later. It can afford to be patient
I remain convinced that a multilingual web will be a reality in a short time, and that a menagerie of tools and services will emerge over the next few years — some geared toward helping translators, some toward building translation communities, and others that make publishing multilingual sites and blogs easy and intuitive.
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