Tech column on web translation tools now at Atlantic site

This tech column about improved online translation tools, especially from Google, is now on the Atlantic's site. (Subscribers only.)

Biggest surprise for me while reporting the story: such systems have gone from being pathetically flawed to becoming useable and even, gasp, "useful," within tight constraints.

With the right kind of structured, formulaic material -- including some news sites in Chinese or Arabic, plus many corporate or governmental sites -- the automatic translators can convey the gist of what is going on. When applied to completely structured information, like that on online commerce sites, they can be extremely effective. I was able to get to, understand, and use the Chinese-language online help file for a Chinese appliance I had bought.

Second biggest surprise: the systems are based almost totally on statistical correlations -- huge volumes of side-by-side English/Arabic or English/Chinese material are fed into them for analysis -- rather than on the efforts of human linguists.

Biggest development that happened after the column went to press: Google's (brilliant) addition of a "suggest a better translation" button to its online translator. After the Google system has created an English version, it pops up the source-language original (Arabic, Chinese, etc) if you hover over an English passage. If you don't like what you see, you can suggest a more nuanced rendering. Yes, you can imagine people trying to sabotage the system with deliberate mis-translations. But in principle this is an extremely shrewd way to improve the more-or-less effective automatic translations with the fine-tuning judgments that only human speakers can make. Potentially this is a dramatic step forward in the application of "collective intelligence."