With its translation efforts now recognizing more than 30 languages, what better partner to work with the user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia than Google?
The search engine touted its efforts last week at Wikimania 2010, claiming that its translation tools have been used to translate “more than 100 million words of Wikipedia content into various languages worldwide”.
According to a blog post on the Google Translate Blog, Google’s Translator Toolkit has been used over the past two years to bring Wikipedia’s 1.3 billion English words and 2.5 million articles to languages like Swahili and Hindi. During the first three months, the service was used to translate “600,000 words from more than 100 articles in English Wikipedia, growing Hindi Wikipedia by almost 20 percent” and has since translated more than 16 million words.
Nonetheless, Google says that it is “off to a good start but, as you can see […] we have a lot more work to do to bring the information in Wikipedia to people worldwide”.
The Translator Toolkit, unlike Google Translate, assists in translating content in a number of ways, rather than simply offering a machine translation and leaving it at that. The service, which is designed to pull Wikipedia’s pages directly, not only offers a translation, but offers help with translating difficult phrases and words. It also shows how other translations have occurred across the Web and, in a very Wikipedian fashion, share translations with others to view and edit.
The use of Google’s Translator Toolkit shows the company’s continuing efforts in the realm of translation. Google has been busy lately, with automated captioning for YouTube videos, auto-translation for websites in Chrome and software to provide real-time voice translation over mobile phones.
