Google is preparing to launch Google Translation Center
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 has been investing significant resources in a multi-year effort to develop its statistical machine translation technology.
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.
That strategy would also eliminate a potential conflict of interest
translation professionals are understandably wary of contributing to something that could put them out of work
as well as avoid channel conflicts with partners who will be their best advocates in selling to various clients
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.
the web will begin translating itself, and within a short time
said to be the first of its kind involving an art museum. It involves 14 of the Prado's choicest paintings,
the images now available on the internet were 1,400 times clearer than what would be rendered with a 10-megapixel camera.
"With Google Earth technology, it is possible to enjoy these magnificent works in a way never previously possible--obtaining details impossible to appreciate through [even] firsthand observation," he said during a news conference at the museum.
The project involved 8,200 photographs taken between May and July last year, which were then combined with Google Earth's zoom-in technology.
"With the digital image we’re seeing the body of the paintings with almost scientific detail," Zugaza said. "What we don’t see is the soul. The soul will always only be seen by contemplating the original."
Spain's Prado Museum has teamed up with Google Earth for a project that allows people to view the gallery's main works of art from their computers--and even zoom in on details not immediately discernible to the human eye.
Today, we're launching an initiative to help authors and publishers discover new audiences for books they've made available for free under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Rightsholders who want to distribute their CC-licensed books more widely can choose to allow readers around the world to download, use, and share their work via Google Books.
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