Google to drop translate API

[jbradfor]

[News is about a month old, but I just came across it....]

Google announced that they are ending their translation API feature. This does not mean that they are stopping their translation feature, which still remains, but they are no longer allowing their translation feature to be used to translate large amounts of text, usually automatically.

source

I found the reason for this interesting.

Initial machine translation programs were generated by language experts to try to have the program "understand" language. However, recent programs, including Google's, uses a different approach called statistical correlation, which doesn't rely on language experts to write the programs, but instead rely on large amounts of expertly translated documents.

As people in the business understand, computerized translation relies heavily on sheer statistical correlation. You take a huge chunk of text in one language; you compare it with a counterpart text in a different language; and you see which words and phrases match up. The computer doesn't have to "understand" either language for this to work. It just notices that the English words "good" or "goods" show up as bon in French in certain uses (ie, as in "opposite of bad"), but as a variety of other French words depending on the context in English -- "dry goods," "I've got the goods," "good grief," etc.

So what is the problem? Google claims that such a high percent of the dual-language documents available on the web are translated using Google translate that it can no longer find enough "quality" translations to continue to improve.

The more of this auto-translated material floods onto the world's websites, the smaller the proportion of good translations the computers can learn from. In engineering terms, the signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse. It's getting worse faster in part because of the popularity of Google's Translate API, which allows spam-bloggers and SEO operations to slap up the auto-translated material in large quantities. This is the computer-world equivalent of sloppy overuse of antibiotics creating new strains of drug-resistant bacteria.

[muirm]

I remember reading that after the public outcry Google decided to develop paid versions of the APIs rather than killing them outright.

[gougou]

...that it can no longer find...

Hmm...

[Gharial]

It might've helped if the software that Google used had been better in the first place. Then again, anyone (i.e. any Google "customer") who relied completely on its automated translation pretty much deserved whatever they ended up with!

[來撒母耳]

That's certainly interesting, the reasoning behind it sounds rather dubious. If true, then they basically are admitting that they created a poorer version of true translation programs, and then realized that they had shot themselves in the foot by doing so... I'm more inclined to believe that it has something to do with all of the new features that google has put into translate, the dictionary functions, the multiple translation functions etc... pure speculation on my part, but they could be simply phasing out their outdated code, and don't want to enable universal access to the new system, and all of it's new features, or they will eventually release a paid-for api for the new stuff.

Oh well, there goes a bunch of terribly automatically translated webpages the web doesn't need... As for services like MDBG, I prefer translating "by hand" using their dictionary... It helps me learn new stuff that way.