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Microsoft has released a translation bookmarklet which allows single-click translation of any website in your own browser. How does it work? Just go to the Microsoft Language Labs website, select the language you want to translate to and drag it to your browser’s bookmark toolbar. After you install it, you can translate any website into the selected language with one click of the bookmark. If you want to have single-click access to website translation in a few languages, no problem. You can use this tool to create more than one translation bookmark on your browser.

Microsoft Translation Bookmarklet

What’s the big deal? There is none. All of the browsers already have plugins that allow single-click website translation. And website translation has always been one or two clicks away (by going to Google or Microsoft and pasting in the websites URL). Additionally, there are plugins that can detect the language of a website and translate it to your own language automatically. (The auto-detect and translation feature was made available in the GTS Translation plugin version 1.2.0).

But I find this move to be encouraging nonetheless, as it shows that Microsoft is trying to make inroads to the consumer by providing free translation tools that are useful. And by providing these tools, Microsoft will build a strong following for its translation system and make it a worthy competitor to Google. We the people can only benefit from this trend.

Lots of people were upset when Google announced that it is terminating its free translation API and launching a paid service. Are you still upset? I think that many of you will be assuaged when you learn that Google Translate, the free online language translation service, now supports free translation of entire documents. This includes Excel, Powerpoint, Word and PDF files. This feature has evidently been around for the last two months, but I just learned about this myself today. You can access this feature from within Google Translate or just click this link.

I tested this feature a bit and translated an assortment of documents in the following file formats: PDF, Excel, Powerpoint and Word. I even translated a 75 page PDF file. Although the translations were served quickly and in all the language pairs that Google Translate offers, some of the formatting and page layout got lost. But if your purpose is gisting, this feature appears to be ideal.

When translating PDF files, please bear in mind that scanned documents will not work in Google Translate. If you want to try and translate a PDF file, provided that the quality of it is not too poor, you can try Google Docs which has an integrated OCR feature.

I find it interesting to note that Google Translate now supports translation of file formats that are not supported by the Google Translator Toolkit (GTT). I guess it’s only a matter of time and Google will eventually add PDF, XLS and PPT to GTT as well.

Related articles

• A Better Way to Translate Office Documents (labnol.org)

The area of Internet translation is large and is growing. As more people are searching for translation services on the web, translation companies are putting more effort into creating engaging and interactive websites. In the last few years, a number of new translation companies have emerged that only sell via the Internet. Some of these companies provide the entire order cycle from quote to delivery online, with no human interaction of any kind.

Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon, is probably the most influential company in the field of general website information, Internet traffic statistics, analytics and metrics. One of the more useful features of the Alexa website is Top Sites, where you can rank websites per topic, industry, etc. I obtained a ranking on Alexa today for translation services company websites (click here to see the Alexa ranking). Here is the top 10 list:

1. Proz.com
2. Translated.net
3. Worldlingo
4. TranslatorsCafe.com
5. SDL International
6. Translation Guide
7. Translation Services USA
8. Lingo24
9. Translatorsbase
10. Applied Language Solutions

In reviewing this list, I made a few observations that I wanted to share with you:

• Four of the website listed by Alexa (Proz, Translators Cafe, Translation Guide and Translators Base) are not translation companies. They are websites that provide language- and translation-related resources.
• Three of the websites are steadily dropping in the Alexa rankings: Applied Language, Worldlingo and Lingo 24. Applied Language used to be the number 2 ranked translation company on the web up to a few years ago, but has strengthened its position as a full-service LSP and is no longer as aggressive in promoting their website. Wordlingo owned the Internet translation business for years but has steadily been losing ground with the emergence of free services and translation widgets from Google, Microsoft and others. Worldingo also tried some risky SEO tactics that may have cost them a lot of traffic (I wrote a blog post about it earlier this year).
• Four of the websites (Applied Language, SDL, Worldlingo and Translation Services USA) employ some form of free machine translation. That factors high in drawing traffic to their website as people are always looking for free translation services.
• All of the translation company websites on this list use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to advance their ranking in the search engines. Several of the companies offer free translation widgets that link back to their website in order to boost their ranking. Several of the websites use some form of online affiliate marketing.
• So far, none of the online translation companies like MyGengo and Onehourtranslation have cracked the top 10 list. That may change in the future and if I detect any significant trends I will let you know.

Related articles

• Translation Services USA’s Crowdsourcing Translator, Ackuna.com, Raises the Bar for More Accurate Machine Translations (prweb.com)
• Crowdsourced website translation service Easyling wins How To Web Startup Challenge (thenextweb.com)
• Is Alexa Web Analytics Flawed & Inaccurate ? (techpluto.com)

I just noticed a new feature on Google Translate: it remembers the last three languages you selected and creates tabs to allow quick selection of those languages. This new feature saves time when you need translation into multiple languages-it’s quicker to click a tab then to select a language from the pull-down menu. Tabs can be selected separately for the source (From) and target (To) languages.

This feature is cool. Google got a lot of heat when it pulled its free API service but this new feature proves that Google is not abandoning R&D on Google Translate and is continuing to add new features that enhance the user experience.

Startup companies are great. Apple Computers and Google are examples of startups that have changed the world. But a startup that launches a product which is purely a Me-Too concept? Surely we can live without it.

Case in point is a company named myLanguage that launched an iPhone app called Vocre. Here is the promotional video (which uses a theme that has been used ad nauseam in countless videos: a boy asking a cute French girl for a date, how original).

 


This company has combined the voice recognition and speech API from Nuance with the Google Translate API to create a speech-to-speech voice interpreter. There is nothing innovative at all about this app. Moreover, it is quite user-unfriendly when you start using it. I spent about 10 minutes trying to get it to work and had to find a video on the Internet that showed me how to use it. OK, so once you get the hang of it the app performs well and translated the few sentences I tried without any troubles. But you can get the same function using the Google Translate iPhone app which has been out for months. And using Google’s app  is 100% free while Vocre charges $0.99 for each 10 translations. Why would any sane person pay for something that is available for free?

Translation by Vocre

Google Translate on iPhone, notice that the translation is identical?

I saw a Robert Scoble video interview with the CEO of myLanguage and some of the plans outlined by the CEO sound interesting: he mentioned the future possibility of having the translations done by humans (crowdsourcing); and that future versions may able to work with no Internet connection (which would be invaluable to rescue workers in disaster stricken areas). But for now, I would say that Vocre is a superfluous app that everyone can live without.

Related articles

• Vocre Turns Your iPhone Into a Real Time Translator With Just a Flip of the Wrist (singularityhub.com)
• Vocre is a free speech translator that instantly translates voice (9to5mac.com)
• Translate on Your iPhone in Real-Time using Vocre (scobleizer.com)
• Vocre Turns Your iPhone Into a Near-Instant Universal Speech Translator [Video] (lifehacker.com)
• BREAKING NEWS! Google to shut down Translate API (gts-translation.com)
• IBM’s Speech-to-Speech translation: no server required (gts-translation.com)
• For smartphone makers, speech-to-speech translation is key to success (gts-translation.com)