Google Improves Their Hand In Website Translations

 

Anyone who has tried to a view a translated website online is well aware of the margin for error. The occasional translation mix up is what motivated Google to improve their website translation feature.

Jeff Chin, a Google Translate product manager recently wrote, "While we've kept improving our machine translation system since [launching], we may not reach perfection until someone invents full-blown Artificial Intelligence.”  His full blog post can be viewed here; http://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2012/05/now-you-can-polish-up-googles.html . 

The new feature is still in Beta testing, but what it does is allow website owners to customize the translated content on their sites so it’s not completely automatic. Once Meta tags are added to the site, visitors will see the translation made by the owner when they’re using Google Translate. Changes made to the sites will go live right away; and the next visitor to translate the page will see the changes. The new feature offers 60 different languages for translation.

But that’s not all. Site visitors are given the option to “Suggest a Better Translation” so they can make suggestions if and when they see an error. Although the “Suggest a Better Translation” feature has been around since 2007, this time it’s new and improved and features ten times as many language options.  Once a suggestion has been made, site owners can choose to accept or reject it for use on their site. 

Thanks to Google, the days of getting frustrated when viewing translated sites are coming to an end.