Google dominates in machine translation tests

Published: August 22, 2005, 6:00 PM PDT
By Michael Kanellos Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Search giant Google's ambitions to make the Web more international got a slight boost from a U.S. government-run test in which its machine translation software beat out competitors from IBM and academia.
Google scored the highest in Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English translation tests conducted by the National Institute of Science and Technology. Each test consisted of translating 100 articles from Agence France Presse and the Xinhua News Agency dated from Dec. 1, 2004, to Jan. 24, 2005. The results were posted earlier this month.
Although computerized translations historically have read more like broken English, increased processing power and larger data samples have allowed scientists to improve the accuracy of these systems.
Start-up Language Weaver, for instance, has created software that can translate Al Jazeera broadcasts. Research on the topic is being tackled at Carnegie Mellon's Language Technology Institute and other universities. (Neither Language Weaver nor CMU participated in the recent test.)
Other participants included the University of Edinburgh, and Harbin Institute of Technology. Most of the software tested came from research labs, NIST said.
Google likely benefited from its huge store of source material. Generally speaking, computerized translation software improves as more data gets fed to it. Through its search operations, Google has amassed billions of translated Web pages.
Like Yahoo and others, Google is looking toward the developing world for new customers. It includes some machine translation tools on its site, as well as several international editions.
Google could not be immediately reached for comment.