Thread: Machine Translation... The end of an era?

Hi All

I just found out we wont have Google translation any longer...

"Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011."

At least I am crushed... I used it plenty... Does anyone know of other engines?
Below is the link to the piece of news I quoted

Google anuncia suspensión de la API de Google Translate

My guess is it will affect not only translators but thousands of "free" programs that hitchhiked on Google's API, SDL (though it also offers 2 other MT options) and other companies and startups that were probably already developing a product around Google API..

The ones that might get some profit out of this will be MT Vendors, probably. Even Google, which I think will probably offer this paid access to service -in the near future-.

Lets wait and see, and in the meantime, heavy users of Google API may as well want to look for a replacement.

Breaking news

Well, behind Google's open-whatever policy, there's almost always an economic interest... It was bound to end the moment it stopped being profitable.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that there was no feedback of improving the translation results as Google Translate API, and they will come up with an alternative to that... ?

It sucks. Really sucks. Sometimes they made sense.

Absolutely... But my scare now is what will we do with all those rush projects that come in... like 150k in 3 days.. The only way of doing those, was machine translation and post editing... And into English, Google translate was awsome... Specially for legal and medical files...Do you know of any other MTs?

J.

More than hitchhiking it was "piggy-backing"...:-)

Hi there

Here at work we are investigating some alternative avenues for automated machine translation. One of them is Moses - Main/HomePage, a statistical machine translation tool I've mentioned in another thread. It's certainly not an out-of-the-box product; it needs heavy massaging to make it work in the first place, and then it's necessary to train it specifically for each language pair. Also training for restricted domains (legal or medical, as Joselas mentions) does a better job than general topics.

I've heard that Google also is a statistical translator, does anyone know for sure?

Cheers.
P.