Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Google has a translation page, where you can translate sentences and web pages between many languages. It is automatic translation that is about 70% accurate I would say, and will in the other cases return wrong or funny results. Machine translation is still not at a point where it can reliably translate texts, but it can provide enough to get the gist of the text, and it helps translators out because the base translation is done, you just need to correct.

So I have experimented with the Google AJAX Language API today. You can find more information and a sample on the following links:

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/reference.html#LangContentType
http://www.google.com/uds/samples/language/translate.html

I was able based on this documentation to create a page where the original text of a question in in the left column, and the automatic translation in the right. An administrator can then verify and correct the new language, and save that question as a draft. As I'm using the Ajax calls, all is implemented in pure javascript on the browser itself, so I don't need any server-side calls or an API license, as it is the client that will request the translation to Google.

An what about the first results? Well, it is not perfect, but it does save a lot of time translating as especially the answer options are usually correct (they are short). The longer the question, the more trouble the automatic translation has to make a correct grammatical sentence out of it.
But first results are promising. I still need to work on it further, but I don't plan to make this a general tool on the site as I fear it will generate a lot of poorly translated questions. I prefer to keep it as a productivity tool to help real flesh and blood administrators to speed up the translation work.

Labels: asp.net, google, google language, machine translation