For some reason, it took me 5 minutes to notice the 'Announcement From 2009' in the title.

Loved it!
Can't wait to be in 2009 :).

Great post.

I hope we see significant improvements to the translation service sooner than 2009.

Yeah? I thought that by 2009 we'd all be speaking English (albeit that horrible version of English that they use in the USA)! :-P

Seriously though – I think this option could really be available well before 2009 – maybe even 2007 – although it obviously won't be anywhere near as accurate as you're describing here. By 2009, we'll probably just select our language in our Google Translate powered web browser and browse all websites in our own language anyway. Same with Gmail and Google Talk – everything (including spam!) will be automatically translated for you too. Then website owners needn't worry about localizing their websites... not unless they actually want proper translations that people will actually understand, of course! (And even Google will struggle to provide those without using human translators.)

I missed the title, but was tipped off at this sentence, "but it was relatively easy thanks to the PHP 7 samples provided by Google."

Andrew

"php 7"
"Web 4.0"

great ideas! :p
just love it.

I haven't noticed the "2009" bit, but I knew it was fake since you called Google Translation API "terrific" ;)
I think it would be no point to automatically translate pages, if everybody had access to those translators. There are thousands of languages, it's a waste of a disk space to keep all automatically translated versions.

The last paragraph of the post is truly insightful.

But, as Tony says, if this language utopia comes to pass (as I presume it will) there's no reason why content creators would set up multiple versions of their websites. The browser will just request the preferred language, and it will be delivered (either translated on-the-fly on the server, or translated with ads by Google). Caching will address most efficiency concerns.

By 2010, English will be replace by a language called American.

I have a high contingent of Chinese visitors to my sites and whilst I am currently learning the language I would still like to provide a service to them. Does anyone know the quality of the english to chinese translations? They are generally much more difficult and less accurate than latin based and european translations.

Sorry, but there's no "Yahoo" os "JeevesIsBack" in 2009, just Y!Live Corporation (created since the judicial split of Microsoft-Yahoo! Corporation in 5 new companies).

Don't forget that the Google Translator API is currently in pre-Labs, and it may not work properly (like in this comment).

<<By 2010, English will be replace by a language called American.>>
Oops, it should be "By 2010, English will be replace by a language called American, in the United States".

And by 2015, American will be replaced by a language called Googlish...? ;-)

Well, Haochi, here in NYC we use Spanglish...

But in the West Coast some talk Chinglish – or something like this...

Tony:
> Seriously though – I think this option could
> really be available well before 2009 – maybe even 2007

Yes, as indicated, in 2009 I will already have this in use for quite some time ;)

Roger:
> The browser will just request the preferred language, and it
> will be delivered (either translated on-the-fly on the server,
> or translated with ads by Google).

True, but as mentioned in the post, storing the pages as redundant copies is the only way to get it to work for all search engines... because if the page is translated on the fly by the Google Toolbar it won't be crawlable by Yahoo and others (unless they all too have perfect transparent translation features built-in).

Other problems with the on-the-fly approach – though I too believe it may definitely arrive! – are CPU/ storage size considerations (even for Google), copyright issues (translations need to be authorized by copyright law), the necessity for all users to use the Google Toolbar (some sites may prefer not to enforce this prerequisite), and ranking issues (rankings work on backlinks, but there's nothing that says e.g. the German translation of a popular English article should automatically rank high for German users – we know Google likes to rank differently for every country-specific Google variant; I guess the same problem applies to HTTP content negotation today).

Some interesting challenges around the corner!

Blah! You got me!! I was wondering why french.outer-court.com is not working lol I thought I was going to change the feed subscription to french :-) What about wildcarded dns, then I can choose the language that I want ?

PHP 7? 2009? Web 4.0? JeevesIsBack? hmm.

n da new lang calld american 'll look lk dis

"n da new lang calld american 'll look lk dis"

that was awesome!!

"JeevesIsBack." ?? :)_

Nice read, for a moment I thought it was fact , till I hit the JeevesIsBack line :)-

I missed the title, but was tipped off at this sentence, "For some reason, it took me 5 minutes to notice the 'Announcement From 2009' in the title."

Wow, very very funny. The first actual proof that this is a joke (of course I don't read the titles well, why should I :) was that "green fruit", I thought noone could be that illiberal... And of course, that language was too precise for automatic translation (I know both German and English and those phrases couldn't be translated so easily, I guess. Not for free, at least;)
Great spot, love it!

FofR, I find Chinese->English translation is pretty good for short sentences, but if you enter a large compound sentence or a large paragraph, the quality goes down (for example, the translator translates two sentences individually one way, but if I put them together in a paragraph and translate it again, the outcome is different and the quality is worse).

Of course, that is Chinese->English. I'm assuming the English->Chinese translation performs similarly.

Andrew

I'll admit that I punched in german.outer-court.com to see what that looked like – surprised you didn't have that in place to carry the "post from the future" one step closer to reality ...

Classic Philipp post – funny and insightful.

C'est bon!

What about a wiki-like translation tool? You could do a human-powered version right now i guess...

However nice that would be, I don't think automatic translation is anywhere near ready for it. Knowing a bit about languages, I think it's highly unlikely that computer-based translations into Chinese are likely to be good Chinese even before the end of this century. German to English and back may be feasible, because they are both Germanic languages – but even then – things like idioms and what words mean in context – just very difficult for machines.

<<(e.g. the German “Apfel” will be translated to “green fruit” instead of “apple”)>>
based on the translate service.. and the fact that you wrote this in German, shouldn't it have some out something like this :
(e.g. the German “green fruit” will be translated to “green fruit” instead of “green fruit”)

;o)

I for one actually read titles!

Google supports the rel="notranslate" since 2008, Travis :)

This type of post is one of your specialties. You are better at it than anyone!

A whole blog of *just* posts from the future would be great.

Now I'm gonna go read that interview with the bearded Larry Page again. (http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-12-15-n68.html)

[quote]Philipp Lenssen

Google supports the rel="notranslate" since 2008, Travis :)[/quote]

that made me laught a bit

erm, yes. Anonymous, i also think 2009 is to early for php7 or web 4.0

Web 4.0 is here. :D

http://blogs.intel.com/it/2006/11/web_40_a_new_hype.html

I didn't realize this was a joke until I came back to it to comment on the translation quality. The 2009 went completely over my head, and I assumed the Web 4.0 thing was some minor translation error. Scary that this almost seems possible.