| Developer(s) | Google Inc |
|---|---|
| Initial release | June 9, 2009 |
| Website | translate.google.com/toolkit |
Google Translator Toolkit is a web service designed to allow translators to edit the translations that Google Translate automatically generates. With the Google Translator Toolkit, translators can organize their work and use shared translations, glossaries and translation memories. They can upload and translate Microsoft Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and Knols.
Google Translator Toolkit is supported by Google Translate, a free online language translation service that instantly translates text and web pages. Google Translate allows users to get instant machine translations of text that they paste into the web interface or of websites for which they supply a link. Google Translate provides automatic translations produced primarily by Statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis. These translations can then be edited using the Google Translator Toolkit editor.
Google Translator Toolkit was released by Google Inc. on June 9, 2009. This product was expected to be named Google Translation Center, as had been announced in August 2008. However, the Google Translation Toolkit turned out to be a less ambitious product: "document rather than project-based, intended not as a process management package but simply another personal translation memory tool".[1]
Google claims that Google Translator Toolkit is part of their "effort to make information universally accessible through translation" and "helps translators translate better and more quickly through one shared, innovative translation technology." [2] Originally the Google Translator Toolkit was meant to attract collaboratively-minded people, the kind who translate Wikipedia entries or material for NGOs. However, nowadays it is more and more widely used in also commercial translation projects.[3]
"The significance of the Google Translator Toolkit is its position as a fully online software-as-a-service (SaaS) that mainstreams some backend enterprise features and hitherto fringe innovations, presaging a radical change in how and by whom translation is performed." [4]
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Starting with only one source language – English and 47 target languages in June 2009, Google Translator Toolkit now supports 100,000 language pairs. Now you can translate from 345 source languages into 345 target languages in Translator Toolkit. [5] It includes Abkhaz, Achinese, Acoli, Adangme, Adyghe, Afar, Afrikaans, Ainu Japan, Albanian, Amharic, Angika, Arabic, Aragonese, Araucanian, Armenian, Aromanian, Assamese, Asturian, Avaric, Awadhi, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Balinese, Baluchi, Bambara, Bantu, Basa (Cameroon), Bashkir, Basque, Beja, Belarusian, Bemba (Zambia), Bengali, Berber, Bhojpuri, Bihari, Bikol, Bini, Bislama, Blin, Bosnian, Braj, Breton, Buginese, Bulgarian, Buriat, Burmese, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chechen, Cheyenne, Chinese (Traditional - Hong Kong/Macau), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Choctaw, Chuukese, Chuvash, Corsican, Cree, Crimean Tatar, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dargwa, Dinka, Divehi, Dogri, Duala, Dutch, Dyula, Dzongkha, English, English (Australia), English (Canadian), English (India), English (Ireland), English (Singapore), English (South Africa), English (UK), Erzya, Esperanto, Estonian, Ewe, Ewondo, Fang, Fanti, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino/Tagalog, Finnish, Fon, French, French (Switzerland), Friulian, Fulah, Ga, Galician, Ganda, Gayo, Gbaya, Georgian, German, German (Austria), German (Switzerland), Gilbertese, Gondi, Gorontalo, Greek, Guarani, Gujarati, Haitian, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Herero, Hiligaynon, Hindi, Hiri Motu, Hmong, Hungarian, Iban, Icelandic, Igbo, Iloko, Indonesian, Ingush, Interlingua, Interlingue, Inuktitut, Inupiak, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kabardian, Kabyle, Kachin, Kalaallisut, Kalmyk, Kannada, Kanuri, Karachay-Balkar, Karakalpak, Karelian, Karen, Kashmiri, Kashubian, Kazakh, Khasi, Khmer, Kikuyu, Kimbundu, Kinyarwanda, Kirghiz, Kirundi, Komi, Kongo, Konkani, Korean, Kpelle, Kuanyama, Kumyk, Kurdish, Ladino, Lahnda, Lamba, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lezgian, Limburgish, Lingala, Lithuanian, Lozi, Latvian, Luba-Katanga, Luba-Lulua, Lunda, Luo, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Madurese, Magahi, Makasar, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Manchu, Mandingo, Manipuri, Maori, Marathi, Mari, Marshallese, Marwari, Maasai, Mende, Minangkabau, Moksha, Mongo, Mongolian, Mossi, Nauru, Navajo, Ndonga, Neapolitan, Nepali, Newari, Nias, Nogai, North Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Nyamwezi, Nyanja, Nyankole, Nyoro, Occitan, Ojibwa, Oriya, Oromo, Ossetic, Pampanga, Pangasinan, Papiamento, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Punjabi, Quechua, Rajasthani, Rarotongan, Rhaeto-Romance, Romanian, Romany, Russian, Samoan, Sango, Santali, Sardinian, Sasak, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Serer, Shan, Shona, Sichuan Yi, Sicilian, Sidamo, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Sicilian, Somali, Soninke, South Ndebele, Southern Altai, Southern Sotho, Spanish, Spanish (Argentina), Spanish (Bolivia), Spanish (Chile), Spanish (Colombia), Spanish (Costa Rica), Spanish (Dominican Republic), Spanish (Ecuador), Spanish (El Salvador), Spanish (Guatemala), Spanish (Honduras), Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Nicaragua), Spanish (Panama), Spanish (Paraguay), Spanish (Peru), Spanish (Puerto Rico), Spanish (United States), Spanish (Uruguay), Spanish (Venezuela), Sranan Tongo, Sukuma, Sundanese, Susu, Swahili, Swati, Swedish, Swiss German, Tahitian, Tajik, Tamashek, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Tetum, Thai, Tibetan, Tigre, Tigrinya, Timne, Tiv, Tok Pisin, Tonga, Tsonga, Tswana, Tumbuka, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvan, Twi, Udmurt, Uighur, Ukrainian, Umbundu, Upper Sorbian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vai, Venda, Vietnamese, Volapük, Walamo, Walloon, Waray, Welsh, Western Frisian, Wolof, Xhosa, Yakut, Yao, Yiddish, Yoruba, Zande, Zapotec, Zaza, Zhuang, Zulu.
Google Translator Toolkit's user interface is available in 36 languages, including Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese,Urdu.
The workflow of Google Translator Toolkit can be described as follows. Firstly, users upload a file from their desktop or enter a URL of a web page, Wikipedia or Knol article that they want to translate. Google Translator Toolkit automatically 'pretranslates' the document. It divides the document into segments, usually sentences, headers, or bullets. Next, it searches all available translation databases for previous human translations of each segment. If any previous human translations of the segment exist, Google Translator Toolkit picks the highest-ranked search result and 'pretranslates' the segment with that translation. If no previous human translation of the segment exists, it uses machine translation to produce an 'automatic translation' for the segment, without intervention from human translators.
Users can then work on reviewing and improving the automatic translation. They can click on the sentence and fix a translation, or they can use Google‘s translation tools to help them translate by clicking the "Show toolkit" button.
By using the toolkit, they can view translations previously entered by other users in the "Translation search results" tab, or use the "Dictionary" tab to search for the right translations for hard-to-find words. In addition, translators can use features like custom, multi-lingual glossaries and view the machine translation for reference. They can also share their translations with their friends by clicking the "Share" button and inviting them to help edit or view their translation. When they are finished, they can download the translation to their desktop. For Wikipedia or Knol articles, they can easily publish back to the source pages.