Google Translation Toolkit – Advanced Translation Tools By Google
We have talked about Google Translate and the various tips & tricks associated with it on this blog. You can consider Google Translation Toolkit as an advanced version of Google Translate which gives you more powers to execute your translation related tasks.
Google Translation Toolkit offers you a Google Docs like interface where you can upload documents for translation and use advanced tools like multilingual gloassaries and translation memories. When you click on upload, it gives you various options like upload a document from your computer, type a web url, translate a Wikipedia or a Knol article. Once you upload stuff and move on, it presents you with the translated version of the page.
I decided to translate this website to my native language, Hindi. It performed the task quite well and also presented me with sharing options and translator tools which I could use to make changes to the article and refine the translation ( this is the main feature which separates it from the ordinary Google translate ).
Apart from the ability to correct translations, I could search past translations to find words for new translations, publish translations directly to Wikipedia or Knol and of course share and collaborate with other translators.
Check out the video below which explains this great tool.
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Are you sure it translated well your website into Hindi? I tested the service with translation to many languages and the translations weren’t even good. I really don’t think you can count on it to translate your website and represent you in front of people from other country. Many people do not understand that this is the result of a software. For real purposes I recommend using human translators. Yes – it costs money at least you know you give high quality service to your users and respect them. There are low-cost alternatives in this case, like OneHourTranslation.com. A professional translator will do much better job!
Tim – No translation is perfect. And this is where this tool is really awesome because it allows you to edit the result. So if you were to use a human translator, this tool could still come quite handy. The translator can just edit the translated version and make it better. It’ll save him a lot of time.
Glad to see there are improvements but often times it can be more work to edit machine translations than to have a human translate the document from the beginning using a glossary and or translation memory. I am still not convinced that machine translation is where it needs to be yet to be a common tool for businesses.
Beverly,
“I am still not convinced that machine translation is where it needs to be yet to be a common tool for businesses”
I know what you mean, but machine translation good or bad has long been a common tool for business.