At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think
Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched
Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.
For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a
Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkit's
bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings — as well as our integration into Wikipedia™, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic. Best of all, our automatic translation system "learns" from her corrections, creating a virtuous cycle that can help translate content into 47 languages, or over 98% of the world's Internet population.
Besides Wikipedia, we've also integrated with
Knol, and we support common document types including Word and HTML. For translation professionals, we provide advanced features such as
terminology and
translation memory management.
Arabic is a key and strategic language for Google. In 2007, we started a
Google-wide initiative to increase availability of our products in multiple languages, including Arabic. To help kick the tires on Google Translator Toolkit for Arabic, we've spent the last few months working with top contributors from Wikipedia™ throughout the Middle East, professionals in Cairo, and volunteer teachers and students at Effat University, a premier, women's university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Effat volunteers translated over 100,000 words of Wikipedia articles into Arabic. These articles were among most widely searched articles throughout the Middle East, and they were either previously unavailable in Arabic or they were short relative to the English article. We are now reviewing and posting these top articles back to Wikipedia, in order help to make Wikipedia™ even more useful in Arabic. As Saudi Arabia's HRH Princess Lolowah Al-Faisal said, Effat worked with Google "to solve the problem of making a huge amount of online information available to Arabic speakers, all over the world."
For more information, check out our introductory video below. And if you're a professional translator or just a linguaphile, try
Google Translator Toolkit for easier and faster translations into Arabic. Be sure and
let us know what you think.
Posted by: Michael Galvez and Wael Ghonim, Google Translator Toolkit team
