Can we assume that this is using their award winning statistical machine translation system? [*]
What worries me about Google playing with things like machine translation is that people see Google as a kind of all-knowing powerful God-like figure. Once Google releases the new machine translation system they're working on, many people who are uneducated in the translation industry could understandably start to assume that Google's translations are much better than those done by professional human translators. (And no matter how many machines Google have performing their translations, that will *never* be the case.)
[*] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/machines-do-translating.html |
Well, this is very good news for me. But it's still far worse than the English-German for example. |
I doubt that it is the automatic translation system that google chose to win the NIST contest.
However, it is interesting to see that this translation tool tries to convert texts from the different scripts. This way, there is a certain chance that names of persons will appear in a readable way (remember that the vocal/consonant concept is solved differently in arabic letters).
If you take ar.wikipedia.org as your source, it is actually quite interesting to read. Google did an amazing job here and there is a long way to go. |
the page translates smth like "gogogoGAGAGAbeebeebee" to smth sounding similar with arabic letters. and vice-versa .. i've tried it |
Google's insistance on a do-it-yourself approach with Arabic technology is mind baffling. In housing research that others have been undertaking for 10+ years cannot be shortened into a few months even by the mighty Google.
It is high time Google took a serious look at existing Arabic technology houses and stop wasting time.
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