GTS Blog

Google Translate, Microsoft Translator and similar machine translation tools are unsuitable for most mission-critical translation jobs. But Google Translate can be effectively used as an aid for various translation-related tasks. This includes using Google as a back translation tool for validation and QA of translations (see a post I wrote about it here). In today’s post, I would like to show you some Google search techniques that we have used to much advantage in translation projects. These simple techniques can be used by professional translators, editors, project managers and anyone who wants to monitor the quality of their translations.

Let’s say your translator turned in a job with some pretty specific industry terminology. How do you know that your translator translated the terms correctly? Incorrect translation of terminology or improper use of acronyms can be devastating to your ad campaign, sales brochure, video presentation, etc. Using Google, it is pretty easy to check for yourself even when your knowledge of the target language is limited.

One thing we need to remember is that Google search has some amazing natural language understanding technology that is initiated as soon as you start typing in your search query. I am sure that most of you know this already but it bears mentioning nonetheless. As you type in a string in Google you can see what the most common uses of it are on the Internet. And since the Internet is so huge, consensus is a very powerful factor in determining what the correct uses of a phrase are. This works in all of the languages which Google supports.

The first thing you want to do is familiarize yourself with the various country versions of Google search by going to Google’s language tools page (scroll down to the bottom of the page where all the flags are displayed). Depending on the language you are working in, you will want to access the country-specific version of Google when using it as a lookup tool. If you want to check a term or acronym in Spanish, access Google Spain or Google Argentina; if you want to check a term in German, go to Google Germany. And so on.

When in the country-specific Google version, type in the term you want to check. Use the Google exact match feature by inserting quotation marks around the term or phrase. If there are no or very few matches, then you know that the translation is probably incorrect. If there is a Wikipedia page for the term, chances are that the term was translated correctly and reading the Wiki page will provide further help on the language usages of that term.

Google's Internet language and country options (Spanish version)

To further pinpoint your search, use Google’s Internet options which are displayed on the left-hand side of the browser. You can choose to only display pages in the targeted language, or to only display pages in the targeted country. By using these search methods, it is easy to check on terminology usage and to verify that your translators have done a good job.

Another option is to type an English phrase into the country version of Google and then to only display the pages in the target language or country. This often provides many examples of how the term is translated in the target language.

I noticed something new today when using the Microsoft Translator. It allows you to login using your Facebook account. After a little Googling (or perhaps I should say Binging for the sake of political correctness) I learned that earlier this week Facebook and Bing announced a partnership that brings Facebook “Like” data and profile search to Bing. Read the post from Mashable here.

The Mashable post and other similar posts made no mention of the social aspect in Microsoft Translator. But the fact that Bing’s translator wants you to sign in with your Facebook account indicates that translation in Microsoft’s world is going to get more social and more targeted.

What does this mean? Well I can think of a few things. First of all, Microsoft and Facebook will start collecting information on your use of language, specifically the foreign languages that a member is interested in. That will allow them to provide you with targeted information and ads based on your international interests. Additionally, the social network will become more international and allow better matching of people who speak different languages. For example: say you are translating information about an Italian product into English. Facebook can show you what people in Italy are saying about that product and allow you to chat with people in Italy to get more information. This is a new direction for Microsoft translation and can give them something extra that Google does not have.

To end on another note: Google announced yesterday in its Google Translate blog that they launched a new feature to provide you with alternate translations for each phrase in the translated text. That very same feature was released a few days earlier by Systran in its new Desktop 7 product (see blog post I wrote about it here). In fact, Systran takes the feature one step further: you can force the use of the alternate meaning in future translations in one click. That way, if you prefer a certain translation of a term, that is the translation that will be used in future translations.

Google recently published a blog post about a new technique for websites that use machine translation for templates but not for the page content. Read it here.

In a recent GTS blog post, I wrote that Google is discouraging people from using Google Translate to create new language versions of a website for SEO purposes. Google even went as far as hinting that it would ban sites that made extensive use of raw, unedited MT.

Some people are using Google Translate (and other MT applications) to translate their website template into other languages while leaving the content untouched. In this manner, the keywords, footer links and other items important to SEO are translated into other languages, promoting the website in other countries. But this practice brings about another problem: duplicate content. Google and other search engines don’t like duplicate content and tend to demote such website pages in the SERP rankings. Now, it appears that Google has proposed a solution to this problem, allowing webmasters to use MT for localization of templates without downgrading the ranking of the localized website pages.

One of the biggest news stories of January 2010 was the cyberattack on Gmail which was said to have originated in China. Google announced that it would no longer censor search results in China, a move which may lead the search engine giant to pull out of China completely, or at least partially. 

A Google departure from the Chinese search scene would be great news for Microsoft, a company which is desperately trying to make gains in the search engine market. Recent reports have indicated that Bing has already made some gains and for the first time in two years has claimed a 10% share of the US search market (read about it here). 

But Microsoft’s strategy for the search engine market in China is unrelated to Google’s troubles. The software giant from Redmond has launched an ambitious project that might make Bing the search engine of choice for Chinese users due to its focus on Chinese language processing. Engkoo is a search engine for exploring and learning language, and was initiated by the Natural Language Processing (NLP) team at Microsoft Research. The project aims at creating the most comprehensive Chinese-English glossary and Statistic Machine Translation (SMT) in existence by mining a massive set of bilingual terms and sentences from across the web.

Google’s domination in the search industry hinges on their ability to provide the results that people are looking for in their keyword searches. By focusing on Chinese language search and by developing technology that will detect what Chinese people are searching for and how they search for it, Microsoft can challenge Google in China by offering a superior product. And by offering a high quality, free, online English learning tool for the most populous nation in the world, Microsoft can bridge the language barrier between China and the western world and allow Chinese companies to compete better both online and in the global marketplace.

Google has released its own phone, Nexus One. It runs Google’s own mobile operation system, Android. And the Google Chrome has already surpassed Apple’s Safari in browser usage. So how long will it take for Google to open an online music store and take away market share from iTunes?

The iTunes store has generated Billions of dollars in sales since it launched in 2003. The iTunes store is currently generating over US$100 Million in sales per month and that number is growing exponentially (see graph). This is a hugely profitable area which Google can compete in.

Google has already made several moves in this direction, and seems poised to become an online music retailer.

• Google has launched a music search service which streams music and offers links to other online music sites.  
• BusinessWeek magazine recently stated that Google has already entered the Online Retailing business (read article here).
• Various sources have reported that Google is in talks with online music retailer Spotify to launch a partnership in online music retail.