Google Translation Center: The World's Largest Translation Memory - GigaOM - 1 views
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Google is preparing to launch Google Translation Center
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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
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Google has been investing significant resources in a multi-year effort to develop its statistical machine translation technology.
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Google Translation Center is a straightforward and very clever way to gather a large corpus of parallel texts to train its machine translation systems.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That strategy would also eliminate a potential conflict of interest
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translation professionals are understandably wary of contributing to something that could put them out of work
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as well as avoid channel conflicts with partners who will be their best advocates in selling to various clients
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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
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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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the web will begin translating itself, and within a short time
