Human Translations by Google

Although Google did not prepare its users for the launch of a human translation tool, as of yesterday, people could access the homepage of the new Google Translation Center. One day after its early beta launch and the new application has already failed, probably because Google engineers only wanted to offer a preview of their new interesting product.

The Google Translation Center is basically a translation tool, but what it makes it special is that translations are provided by humans, instead of programs. People who want to have their texts translated into one of the 40 languages have to upload them and wait for the documents to be taken off their hands by professional or volunteer users. “If a translator accepts, you should receive your translated content back as soon as it’s ready,” said the Google website yesterday. The thing is that a free of charge system is anything but appealing to professionals who earn a living out of translating.

As we said, while volunteers may have nothing against doing some work for free, in order to gain a good reputation, professionals also have to receive some sort of remuneration. However, this part of the bargain falls exclusively on the persons who upload content to be translated. Google is just an intermediary in the process, but it is believed that human translations will help the team of developers improve the linguistic tools they are working with. To avoid the situation where the translation center could become a genuine Babel Tower, Google came up with a solution: all translations will be filtered, so that duplicates will not appear.

For now, only the members of Google’s Trusted Tester Program, which are basically family members and friends, have the chance to test the program. Although parts of the website were available for a couple of hours, users will still have to wait for a while longer, until the product goes beyond the early beta phase.