Comments on: Google Translates Documents and Email Too

By: Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-) » The Google Translate Challenge

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:41:04 +0000

[...] my posts, Google Translates Documents and Email Too and Thai Google Translate: Will Crowdsourcing Work, we got to discussing how Google Translate takes [...]

By: Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-) » Thai Google Translate: Will Crowdsourcing Work?

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:49:21 +0000

[...] a previous post – Google Translates Documents and Email Too – we got into a discussion about the possible crowdsourcing aspects built into Google [...]

By: Catherine Wentworth

Catherine Wentworth — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:56:48 +0000

Jeff, that makes sense. And just like Wiki (which is good for on-the-fly information), if we want a version that we are absolutely sure of, we go to a professional source.

It will be interesting to check back in just a years time to see if anything has changed. So I guess what I should do is run a series of translations through them now, then again a year from now.

By: Jeff Gray

Jeff Gray — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:13:22 +0000

Catherine, you asked what happens if someone suggests a poor or mischievous translation. I don’t know how they handle it, there is no mention of the process online.

It might be set up to work the way that Wikipedia works. While there are cases of accidental or deliberate errors, the sheer volume of people adding useful stuff to Wikipedia makes it immensely useful. Wikipedia is also inherently self correcting, because if someone writes rubbish, it will be corrected by others.

In the same way, having millions of users making minor improvements to the translation system does something that any single company could never do with internal resources only. It might be chaotic, but the sheer scale is unbeatable.

Time will tell, but the approach they’ve taken is potentially a very effective one.