GTS Blog

With 2011 nearly gone, most of you are already deep in the holiday spirit and probably thinking of things other than work. So what better time than now to summarize the biggest events in our industry in 2011? In my opinion, 2011 was not a very exciting in the translation industry. A “Top 10″ list would have been better, but I found it hard to stretch it beyond 5. Ready? Here’s my list:

1. Google becomes a translation vendor. This was a tidal wave in the relatively calm waters of the translation industry: Google got millions of people hooked by providing unlimited, free machine translation for several years. In May, 2011 they announced that the free lunch is over. This caused shock among many people both in and out of the industry. It upset many people, especially developers who created products around the free translations. Google then added more fuel to the fire by announcing a few weeks later that it was making the API a paid option.
2. Microsoft strengthens its position in MT. 2011 will have proven to be a watershed year for the Bing Translator team at Microsoft Research. When Google made its dramatic announcement, Bing Translator chief Chris Wendt swiftly announced that Microsoft will continue to provide free API services. This won over a lot customers, who came to distrust Google. And when Bing made the terms of their commercial license known, it was done in an understated way that did not cause any of the histrionics associated with Google’s announcement.
3. Translation startups get serious. In 2011 several startup companies like Smartling, MyGengo and Cloudwords raised Millions of dollars from VCs to deploy online translation services. With that kind of money being invested these companies will surely make their presence felt in the years to come and will compete with veteran companies in the translation services market. These companies will also help propagate some of the new work-flows that people are talking about recently like crowdsourcing and post-edited machine translation.
4. Facebook machine translation integration. In 2011 Facebook integrated Microsoft Translation to enable its users to read messages that are in different languages. This should be an industry driver and will help advance machine translation technology, due the size and influence that Facebook carries in the world. Will Facebook stay with Microsoft? Will they develop their own tools? Will Microsoft develop new tools for Facebook? I don’t have the answers but I am positive that Facebook will work at making cross-language communication different and better than what it is today.
5. Transperfect acquisition of Worldlingo. Transperfect is one of the biggest translation companies and it will be interesting to see if they can grow Worldlingo as an online translation business; and if selling translations online will become a significant part of their business.

What didn’t we see in 2011? We did not see any significant advances in speech-to-speech translation. In recent years IBM, Microsoft and Google made a lot of announcements about speech-to-speech translation R&D. But these announcements did not turn into any new commercial products or services in 2011. We also did not see any revolutionary new translation products for mobile smartphones. I hope we see some exciting new translation products in 2012.

Merry Christmas to everyone! Happy Holidays, Dave

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?

Image via Wikipedia

For years MS Office applications, like MS Word, have come bundled with spell checkers and grammar checkers in different languages. Everyone knows that. But now it seems that the folks at Redmond have come up with a way to simultaneously spellcheck documents that are written in a combination of different languages. The NY Times featured a blog post about it a few days ago. Click here for the Microsoft web page that explains this exciting new feature in detail.

This feature has huge implications for machine translation systems. One of the problems that many MT users experience is translating web pages or documents that are written in several languages. MT systems go from one language to another. So for example if you have a blog post which has comments in several languages, the MT is unable to translate everything and will just pass through some of the text as-is. The following screenshot says it all:

Now this may all change since one of the biggest MT vendors is Microsoft, the company that develops MS Office. Maybe the MS Research people who run the Bing Translator project will talk to the MS Office people and bring over this great feature. I wrote a blog post last year about integrating spell and grammar checking tools into the MT post editing process with information which is relevant to the transfer of language technology from MS Office to Bing Translator.

Perhaps other MT vendors can implement this feature by combining language recognition and spell/grammar checking. I am sure that the multiple language spellcheck feature will cross-over to MT sometime in the not too distant future.

PS Don’t forget to try our new GTS Website Translator at http://webtranslator.gts-translation.com.

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