A Potential Tipping Point in Translation
A colleague of mine asked me how the translation on a the Royal Ocean Racing Club website works, I explained that it was a free service offered by Google and that it could easily be applied to any site for free. (The site itself just uses a little bit of JavaScript to link to the pages.)
He was surprised that such functionality was available for free and said it was "a really good way to add multilingual functionality to client websites" adding that people are likely to be forgiving of the sometimes confusing results if they can see that the translation is done by Google.
I do agree that this is, on the surface at least a pretty cool service, but I wouldn't feel comfortable suggesting this to clients as a long term solution to the issue of translation - the results are not good enough and the URLs are untrustworthy because, like some phishing scams, they use IP addresses instead of domain names e.g.
http://66.249.93.104/translate_c?hl=en&langpair=en%7Cja&u=http://www.rorc.org/
Assuming you can overcome this problem with some Apache redirection, that just leaves the issue of translation quality, and this is an area that's set to change…
I recently saw that Google are now accepting feedback on their dodgy translations. This will allow them to build up a huge database of translations in much the same way as they have with their database of misspellings.
In much the same way that Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion the Rosetta Stone to decode ancient Coptic symbols, Google can apply their trusty brute-force data mining techniques to spot patterns and effectively teach the machine new languages languages.
I may have simply overlooked this in the past, but I've started to notice the term 'rosetta' in some Google URLs, which I take as another clue that something's going to happen in this space soon.
In any case, if improvements in translation quality are analogous improvements in spell check quality, then I think we can expect to see an explosion of multilingual sites in the next couple of years.