GTS Blog

On December 1, 2011 Google shut down the free version of its Translate API (v1) and informed that all users would have to switch over to the paid Translate API version (V2). As many of us have anticipated, this ended the party for many companies that enjoyed free translation services. Here is a partial list of websites/products that have discontinued free translation services to at least some extent.

• Ackuna, the Cloud Translator. The website is still there but the free translation has not been working in the last 24 hours. (Ackuna is owned by Translation Services USA, see next on the list).
• Translation Services USA. This company switched over to the Microsoft Translator API so some of the languages work. But some of the languages (like Welsh and Yiddish) which Microsoft does not support are not working.
• Ortsbo. This company also switched over to the Microsoft Translator API and some languages work. But some of the languages don’t work even though they remain as menu selection options.
• Lingo24. This company has discontinued its free online translation services.
• AsiaTranslate.net. This company has discontinued its free online translation services.
• ToLingo. This company has discontinued its free online translation services.
• Transperfect Transimage. This is an iPhone app developed by Transperfect which ran on the Google Translate API. It no longer works. I am betting that there are more free translation apps for smartphones that no longer work.

There are also a lot of websites that used free widgets that were powered by Google Translate V1 or that used scripts that called the deprecated API. You will be able to see some of them by doing a search on “Unable to perform Translation: Please use Translate v2.” Google terms this as a Terms of Service Abuse, click here for more details.

Anyone remember the Y2K scare? For months leading up to the new millennium, the news media brought us lurid predictions of the havoc which would be wreaked by the Y2K effect. Would planes fall out of the sky? Would the pumps at the gas stations stop working? The power grid? Would the bank computers know how much money we have? Lots of people, myself included, were worried and waited in anticipation for the clock to strike midnight on 1.1.2000.

Why am I bringing this up? Well tonight may be doomsday for developers who built applications around the Google Translate API, and users of those applications. In it’s announcement last May, Google announced that it would be terminating its free Translate API service.

 The courtesy limit for existing Translate API v2 projects created prior to August 24, 2011 will be reduced to zero on December 1, 2011. In addition, the number of requests your application can make per day will be limited. Google Translate API v1 will be shut off completely on the same date (December 1, 2011).

So tonight is the night. Just like in the story of Cinderella, the fair maiden must leave by midnight or be revealed as a chambermaid. But will she leave a glass slipper behind? Will the prince be able to find the fair maiden with the only foot to fit the slipper?

What will happen to all of the applications that run on the free Google translations? Will the translations stop working? Will we start to see a Google message that says “this website needs a different google api key” (like it does for Google Maps)? Will the developers who switched to the Microsoft Translator API need to discontinue some of the languages (since Google has some language pairs that Microsoft does not). Will some developers start to charge money for automatic translation services? I’ll be on the lookout for answers to these questions and I hope you will too. Please report anything you see.

Another issue I am interested in is security. Now that Google is charging for use of its API, will hackers try and target the API? A blog post I just saw warns against this very eventuality. Will some clever developer find a way to spam the (still) free Google translation website and mine the translations for free? Will Google be able to clamp down on this? These are questions which will be interesting to learn more about as the events unfold.

In translation industry news: Transperfect is continuing its shopping spree by acquiring Worldlingo, the company that pioneered the Internet translation industry (read the news here).

Worldingo was founded in the late 1990s by Australian Phil Scanlan, an independently wealthy and very shrewd business person. Mr. Scanlan did a few things that caused Worldlingo to prosper. He purchased a Systran Enterprise Server 5 system and started selling machine translation solutions for websites years before anyone had even dreamed about doing it. He gave away free website translation widgets that linked back to the Worldlingo site. This gave Worldlingo number 1 ranking in nearly every keyword phrase associated with translation. And he made a deal with Microsoft that integrated Worldingo into every Microsoft Office product software license so when someone asked for translation from Microsoft Word, for example, they received the free translation from Worldlingo.

All of this gave Worldlingo total domination of the search engines for years. And they made a ton of money. But since then a few things have happened: (1) Phil Scanlan left Worldlingo in pursuit of other endeavors. (2) Microsoft dumped Worldlingo in favor of their own MT which is now integrated in MS Office. (3) Google and Microsoft offer free translation widgets so who needs Worldingo for that? (4) Worldlingo stagnated with outdated Systran 5 technology and left it there for years. Only about 2 years ago did they integrate Language Weaver into their website. (5) Many new companies have started to resell MT solutions and Worldlingo is now just one of several in the field. (6) Worldlingo has been dropping like crazy in the search engine rankings and is continuing to lose ground. And Worldlingo lives on Internet traffic.

Which leads us to Transperfect. What are they buying? MT technology? Worldlingo does not have any proprietary MT technology that I know of and licenses software from MT vendors. Customers? Customer loyalty in the online world is fickle (how can you be loyal to a website?). Worldlingo does have a very snazzy online ordering system. But they now face stiff competition from other online translation companies like Babylon and MyGengo. The software solutions they are selling for website translation are outdated and now face stiff competition from companies like ToLingo and Smartling.

The main asset which Transperfect is buying, in my opinion, is a (still) strong online presence. Something that Transperfect is lacking. The question is: will Transperfect breath new life into Worldlingo? Will they integrate new technology which will revive the website and make it a dominant player in face of all the new competition? Will they pump in funds to improve the site in face of the growing competition in the online translation world? Will they be able to help Worldlingo stop their online decline?

Transperfect’s acquisition policy, to the best of my knowledge, is to let the management continue to do their own thing after the deal has been made. The big question is: will that save Worldlingo?

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)