## Google Translate

Google Translate is the service offered by Google, to translate sentences, web sites and compete texts between an ever-growing number of languages. At the time of writing the list includes more than 50 languages, from Albanian to Yidish, including of course all the major languages (see Languages available for translation). It's translation produced by state-of-the-art technology, without the intervention of human translators. Google's research group has developed its own statistical translation system for the language pairs now available on Google Translate. As opposed to user-generated translation memories on one side (like in the case of OmegaT) or rule-based systems (usually found under the name of "machine translation" or MT in short) Google can afford a different approach: they feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. Statistical learning techniques are then applied to build a translation model, achieving very good results in research evaluations.
The quality of the translation of course depends on one side on the reservoir of target-language texts and the availability of their bilingual versions, on the other hand on the quality of the models built. It is pretty much certain that while the quality may be insufficient in some cases, it will definitely get better with time and not worse. Even today's most sophisticated software, however, doesn't approach the fluency of a native speaker or possess the skill of a professional translator. Automatic translation is very difficult due to context problems (the sentence "Time flies like an arrow" being just the best known example for it), it may be some time before anyone can offer human quality translations.
The OmegaT user is not forced to use Google Translate. If used, neither the user's decision to accept the translation nor the final translation are made available to Google. The following window shows an example of a) the English source b) Spanish and c) Slovenian Google Translate translation.
The Spanish translation is better than the Slovenian. Note interesar and navegar in Spanish, translating the verbs interest and sail correctly. In the Slovenian version both words have been translated as nouns. Remember however, that the difference is solely due to the fact that there's far more bilingual material available for the Spanish language than there is for Slovenian.

### How to use Google Translate in OmegaT

To activate its use, check the Google Translate menu entry in Options to on. When using it the first time, you will need to execute "Restore Main Window" - last menu entry in Options. If the Google Translate pane is not opened, click on "Google Translate" in the line at the bottom of the window to open the pane. Adjust its position to your liking.
From now on a suggestion for the translation will appear in the Google Translate pane for every new source segment opened. If you find the suggestion acceptable, press `Ctrl+M` to insert it into the target part of the opened segment. In the above segment, for instance, `Ctrl+M` would overwrite the Spanish version with the Slovenian suggestion.
If you do not want OmegaT to send your source segments to Google to get translated, uncheck the Google Translate menu entry in Options.

### Google Translate trouble shooting

If there's nothing appearing in the Google Translate pane, then check the following:

- Are you online? You need to be online to be able to use Google Translate.
- What is the source language? Google Translate may not as yet be able to offer its services for it.
- Check Google Translate online for your language pair. Does it work?

Legal notices | Home | Index of contents