Monday, August 25, 2008

Google Translation Onebox

Google has a new direct result showing translations, triggered for certain queries. Here are some examples:

• [translate Hello into French] - Google offers the translation “allô, bonjour”.
• [translate Einkommensteuer] - “Einkommensteuer” is a German word meaning “income tax”. As the target language was omitted, Google translates to English. Instead of the short translation Google finds a longer phrase in its dictionary and presents the English text “their joint assessment for income tax”.
• [translate glasses into German] - glasses are an ambiguous term; Google finds two translations but doesn’t use the shortest words in their translation (e.g. they show “Lesebrille” – reading glasses – instead of just “Brille”).
• [translate friend into Chinese] - Instead of just showing “朋友”, Google prints the text “与...为友;帮助, (经常遇见的)陌生人” as translation. Similarly, entering [translate hello into Chinese] results in much more than just the appropriate word.

Here are two sample queries which specifically do not trigger the onebox:

• [translate Pferd into Italian] - here I’m using the German word “Pferd” – horse – to see if I can do an instant translation into Italian, but this isn’t possible; no onebox shows up for this query. The query [translate Pferd from German into Italian] does not work either.
• [translate “Hallo” into English] - this query does not work either due to the use of quotes (Google only shows a spelling correction suggestion, asking ’Did you mean: translate ’Hello’ into English”).

All in all such a translation onebox if done right would be an incredibly helpful feature. I’m currently using a Firefox search box connected to Leo.org for English to German translations, and I’m referring to it quite frequently. However, the quality of the translation onebox by Google is surprisingly bad... it just doesn’t always find the most appropriate words to look up in the dictionary. Even if we’d assume the translator would be right 70% of the time, it would still be almost useless because if you don’t speak the language you also can’t easily verify whether or not you’ve hit on one of those 30% bad results.

Also see Google’s translate gadget, available as a “subscribed links” feature to add to your results, and Google onebox results we still need (from 2006)..

[Thanks TomHTML!]

Google Translation Onebox by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (7)

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