HEADLINES:
R/€ Google seeks world of instant translations
March 29, 2007 Edition 1
Adam Tanner
In Google Inc's vision of the future, people will be able to translate documents instantly into the world's main languages, with machine logic, not expert linguists, leading the way.
Google's approach, called statistical machine translation, differs from past efforts in that it forgoes language experts who programme grammatical rules and dictionaries into computers.
Instead, they feed documents humans have already translated into two languages and then rely on computers to discern patterns for future translations.
While the quality is not perfect, it is an improvement on previous efforts at machine translation, said Franz Och, a German who heads Google's translation effort at its Mountain View headquarters south of San Francisco.
Och, who speaks German, English and some Italian, feeds hundreds of millions of words from parallel texts such as Arabic and English into the computer, using United Nations and European Union documents as key sources.
Languages without considerable translated texts, such as some African languages, face greater obstacles.
"The more data we feed into the system, the better it gets," said Och.
The program applies statistical analysis.
So far, Google is offering its own statistical machine translations of Arabic, Chinese and Russian to and from English at www.google.com/language_tools. Third-party software gives access on the site to German and other languages, Och said.
"So far, the focus is let's make it really, really good," Och said. "As part of a general Google philosophy, once it's really useful and it has impact, then there will be found ways how to make money out of it."
Miles Osborne, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, praises Google's effort but sees limitations.
"The best systems can be very good indeed for language pairs such as Arabic-English," he said.
But he added software will not overtake humans in expert translations as it has in playing chess; software should be used for understanding rather than polishing documents. - Reuters
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