Cyberstrategics

Bookstores everywhere in the world are full of dictionaries, language courses and common phrase guides for foreign travel. I don’t have the estimates in front of me, but language translation goods and services - books, electronic gadgets, human translators, interpreters and more, must be a multi-billion dollar global business. Companies like Google are rapidly positioning themselves to cash in on the huge business of language translation.

One of the holy grails of the human spirit is the dream to communicate with peoples of all cultures and languages. Just think how great it would be to log into any social networking site, blog or forum and be able to read and post comments in your native language and, at the same, have your words available to every human on the network regardless of their languages. This is indeed the holy grail of Web 3.0.

Granted, the art-and-science of machine language translation (MLT) has a long way to go. Often MLT results can be really bad or outrageously funny, as we all know. A number of people are very negative about MLT because the results are not perfect and often completely wrong. Other people are happy to have any MLT that helps them find information or attempt to communicate.

In my next series of posts I will examine some of the specific progress being made in this exciting area. In particular we will look at some recent advances in modern forum (bulletin board) software by Michal Podbielski that uses the Google Translation API to translate forum posts as they are posted (in “real-time” as folks like to say). In addition, we will discuss the benefits of making unique content available world-wide in a wide-range of languages even when the MLT results are not “perfect”. We will also look into some of the controversy between developers of vBulletin SEO software and MLT software and try to understand why a handful of vB SEO developers are so negative regarding the software development work of Michal Podbielski and others.

Filed under: Cyberstrategics, Use Cases