ImTranslator blog

By Bill Softky

After just a couple years of practice, Google can claim to produce the best computer-generated language translations in the world - in languages their boffin creators don’t even understand.

Last summer, Google took top honors at a bake-off competition sponsored by the American agency NIST between machine-translation engines, besting IBM in English-Arabic and English-Chinese. The crazy part is that no one on the Google team even understands those languages…. the automatic-translation engines they constructed triumphed by sheer brute-force statistical extrapolation rather than “understanding”.

The Google approach is a lesson in practical software development: try things and see what sticks. It has just a few major steps:

1. Google starts with lots and lots of paired-example texts, like formal documents from the United Nations, in which identical content is expertly translated into many different languages. With these documents they can discover that “white house” tends to co-occur with “casa blanca,” so that the next time they have to translate a text containing “white house” they will tend to use “casa blanca” in the output.

2. They have even more untranslated text in each language, which lets them make models of “well-formed” sentence fragments (for example, preferring “white house” to “house white”). So the raw output from the first translation step can be further massaged into (statistically) nicer-sounding text.

3. Their key for improving the system - and winning competitions - is an automated performance metric, which assigns a translation quality number to each translation attempt. More on this fatally weak link below.

Read the entire article

This article produced many comments, some of them are very interesting …

The author tried to compare the Google translator with other translation engines, including Paralink.

Paralink - 8 Google - 0

By Jurgen

Posted Tuesday 15th May 2007 08:21 GMT

I recently evaluated several free translation engines available on the market on a simple paragraph of text using the same Spanish text as the source and English as the target language (you can always do that even if you speak only one language fluently like most people in English-speaking countried do).

Google produced 8 style errors and 2 grammar errors on the paragraph while another engine (Paralink) performed only 1 style error and 0 grammar errors, a massive difference. It shows that the competition where computer programs score other computer programs (with a score like BLEU) is pretty much meaningless.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Paralink nor do I own their stock; just wanted to set the record straight that Google is not the only game in town, nor is it even best or market leader. Now the problem is that it is hard to find Paralink using Google search, but that’s a whole different story :). But thankfully we still have other search engines…

 But it should be noted that Google Spanish translator doesn’t use statistical approach, but the Systran’s translation engine which is the rule-based machine translation.

Paralink vs Google

By Max

Posted Tuesday 15th May 2007 20:41 GMT

I just tried Paralink, and found it pathetic. I use Google’s translator in the way described at the end of the article, to provide a rough framework or gist, and then make sense of the output accordingly. I often look at a sentence or phrase from the Google output and compare it with the Spanish original to see how to refine the Google version. Paralink’s output, though, was dire. Not only does the web translator apparently only do much smaller blocks of text than Google, its vocabulary seems to be much smaller, with “prima” being translated as “premium” instead of “cousin”, and some verbal phrases with “el (+ verb form)” being left untranslated entirely. If one has any grasp of the target language, I think Google’s service is great, often providing a framework within in which it is possible to finish the translation job by yourself. From what I’ve seen, Paralink isn’t there yet. YMMV, of course.