Computing Power of Google Translate

At a meeting held at Google in 2004, the subject focused on a company's e-mail received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, which is one of the two founders of Google company, runs the message through an automatic translation service that the company has patented.

The message reads Google was the favorite search engine, but the translation says: "The sliced raw fish will put horseshoes. Google green onion thing!"

Brin said Google should have done better. Six years later, a free translation service Google handles 52 languages, more than any other similar system, and people use it hundreds of millions of times a week to translate Web pages and other text.

"What you see on Google Translate is a work of art" in computer translations are not limited by a particular subject area, said Alon Lavie, an associate research professor at the Institute of Language Technology at Carnegie Mellon University, as quoted by The New York Times.

Google's efforts to expand more than just a search engine has produced a variety of success. Digital books have been hung on the court, and the introduction of the social network, Buzz, increasing fears of privacy. The example shows that Google could be one step as they try to challenge business traditions and cultural conventions.

But Google's rapid rise to the level of the upper echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what will happen when Google releases a powerful computational strength on complex issues.

Network data centers are built for Web searches may now be the biggest computer in the world combined. Google is using that machine to push the limits of translation technology. For example, approximately two months ago Google said that they are working combine its translation tool with image analysis that can translate the posts in the drawing.

"Machine translation is one of the best examples that shows Google's strategic vision," said Tim O'Reilly who is the founder and chief technology publisher O'Reilly Media. "It's not something that is taken very seriously by anyone. But Google understands something about data that nobody else, and they are willing to make the investments necessary to tackle these complex issues ahead of the market."

Creating a machine translation has long been seen as one of the most difficult challenges in the field of artificial intelligence. Over the decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach that teaches a computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.

But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a statistical approach. They found that if they tell the computer thousands or millions of paragraph together with the translation of the human, the computer can learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.

It turns out this technique that requires very large data and computational power, it is suitable to the circumstances of Google.

"Our infrastructure is in accordance with this," said Vic Gundotra who is vice president of engineering at Google. "We can do the approaches can not even dream of the other party."

Automatic translation systems are still far from perfect, even Google will not make human translators lose their jobs in the near future. Experts say it is difficult for a computer to break a sentence into parts and then translate and reunite them.

But Google services good enough to convey the essence of a news article, and it has become a source of instant translation for millions of people. "If you want a rough translation of fast food, it is a place to visit, said Philip Resnik which is a machine translation expert and an associate professor in the linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Like its competitors in the field, the best known such as Microsoft, IBM, and Apple, Google has included the machine translator with a transcript of the opening of the United Nations which was translated by humans into six languages, and from the European Parliament which was translated into 23 languages. The basic materials used to train the system with the most common languages.

But Google has been exploring Web manuscript, as well as the data of book scanning project and other sources, to move beyond the limits of those languages. For more obscure languages, Google presents a "toolbox" that helps the users in the translation and then adding these texts into their data base.

Google offers could hurt sales of software from companies such as IBM But automated translation is unlikely to ever be producing a lot of money, at least not of the standard Google's advertising business. Still, the hard work of Google could be beneficial in many ways.

Therefore, Google's online ads everywhere, anything that makes people easy to use Web benefits the company. And the system could lead to new applications. A few years ago, the company said they would use voice recognition to make the writings below the image in English YouTube videos, which could then be translated into 50 other languages.

"This technology can make a barricade languages disappear," said Franz Och who is the chief scientist at Google who heads the company's machine translation team. "It could permit anyone to communicate with each other."

Och a German researcher who previously worked at the University of Southern California said he was initially reluctant to join Google, fearing it would treat translation as a side project. Larry Page, who founded Google in addition to Brin, calling and convincing Och.

"Basically, he said that this is something very important to Google," said Och. Pak Och entered in 2004 and immediately brought the promise of Page into the trial.

While many translation systems similar to Google has used billions of text words to build a mapping of a language, Google uses more: a few hundred billion words in the English language. "It's mapping to get better and continue to improve if more manuscripts are processed," said Och.

Strenuous efforts ultimately benefit. A year later, Google won a competition organized by the government that tests a variety of complicated translation system.

Google has used a similar approach to that great computing power, heaps of data and statistics, to address other complex issues. For example, in 2007, the company began offering 800-GOOG-411 directory assistance service which is free which translates spoken words. This service allows Google to collect various voices of millions of people in order to be better at recognizing spoken English.

A year later, Google launched a search system based on sound as good as the artificial years other companies.

Google has also introduced a service called Goggles that analyzes the photos with mobile phones, match it with a database of more than one billion online images, including photographs of various streets taken for its Street View service.

Och acknowledged that Google's translation system still needs improvement, but he said the system was rapidly getting better. "Quality improvement curve is still high," he added.

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