What Will Change After Google Translate API Shutdown

June 1st, 2011 by Dario Solera | Filed under Amanuens.

A few days ago Google announced that the Translate API will be shutdown this December. All hell broke loose.

My take on this decision is that it will change exactly nothing, and the reason is that Google Translate is quite poor in terms of translation quality. Since when we integrated Amanuens with the Translate API, I started getting quite upset at the quality of translations. I’ll make an example. The source text is:

Warning: this Page is being edited by another user

Google Translate comes up with (in Italian):

Attenzione: questa pagina viene modificato da un altro utente

Not only the translation sounds weird in Italian, but it’s even wrong as “modificato” is masculine, while “pagina” (page) is feminine.

Sure, Google Translate is great if you have a piece of text in a language you don’t understand and you need to get a grasp of its meaning, but using it for translating text for production is just plain dumb. I also believe that using Google Translate to get a first draft of a translation is not a good idea because, oftentimes, it’s harder to fix an existing translation rather than writing it from scratch. Taking the example above, the translator should just fix one word, assuming she spots the error, (“modificato” -> “modificata”) – yet the sentence still sounds weird and should be rewritten from scratch.

So, for very short sentences, Google Translate might work well (e.g. “Save document”), but for those we already have pretty powerful translation memory technologies. So, Translate becomes useless even in this case.

For all these reasons, although shutting the API down is a bit lame, I think that that decision will not affect the translation and localization industry at all. Possibly, it will give us back the feeling that professional translators are extremely valuable, even for often-undervalued software localization jobs.

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3 Responses to “What Will Change After Google Translate API Shutdown”

  1. Nicolas Raoul says:
    June 6, 2011 at 06:21

    Not that I like Microsoft, but they have an API that can be used instead, and provides relatively good translations. Crowdin uses it already.

    I use this feature when translating from English (my software’s primary language) to French (my mother tongue) and it saves me a lot of typing.

  2. Dario Solera says:
    June 8, 2011 at 11:16

    Yes, that would be useful. Would you mind adding an idea in our feedback forum? http://threeplicate.uservoice.com/forums/44829-amanuens

  3. Dwight Stegall says:
    November 8, 2011 at 16:22

    I remember what it was like before Google Translate arrived on the web. I was a community leader at Geocities.com. Each one of us had a certain block of addresses to patrol for rule breakers and to help out newbies. If you didn’t speak or write their language you had to get another person to translate their pages to help them or delete their site if they refused to follow the rules. Then it would take weeks sometimes to find a human translator to help us.

    Now that we have Google Translate that task would be very simple. I don’t want to go back to doing it the hard way again. The other mechanical translators aren’t as good as Google Translate.

    Google translate like you said doesn’t do a perfect job at translating text. But it is far better than nothing. I’m really going to miss it.

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