Tutorial Online

"...Of course translation services are vital components to facilitate the world-wide sharing of educational resources. " - Joseph Hart


WHAT?
"Google Translator Toolkit is part of Googles effort to make information universally accessible through translation. Google Translator Toolkit helps translators translate better and more quickly through one shared, innovative translation technology.

Heres what you can do with Google Translator Toolkit:

• Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols.
• Use previous human translations and machine translation to pretranslate your uploaded documents.
• Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to improve the pretranslation.
• Invite others (by email) to edit or view your translations.
• Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
• Download documents to your desktop in their native formats --- Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML.
• Publish your Wikipedia and knol translations back to Wikipedia or Knol." - Source

EXAMPLE PLEASE!
"For example, if an Arabic-speaking reader wants to translate a Wikipedia™ article into Arabic, she loads the article into Translator Toolkit, corrects the automatic translation, and clicks publish. By using Translator Toolkits bag of tools — translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and ratings, she translates and publishes the article faster and better into Arabic. The Translator Toolkit is integrated with Wikipedia, making it easy to publish translated articles. Best of all, our automatic translation system "learns" from her corrections, creating a virtuous cycle that can help translate content into 47 languages, or over 98% of the worlds Internet population." - Michael Galvez and Sanjay Bhansali


EASE-TO-USE?

This video will teach you how to use the Google Translator Toolkit in 1 minute 37 seconds (it is that easy!):

I have been exploring translation software for years, and it just amazes me how much they have improved over the years, especially Googles arsenal of translation tools. For example now, I can easily read any blog in 47 languages and comment back, and the translations seem good (at least understandable). For example, a few weeks back I read a Spanish blog post referring to one of my posts, and then I commented in Spanish using Google translator. I am not 100% sure it was 100% correct, but since then I have got Spanish speaking learning professionals e-mailing me this and that in Spanish.

I suppose English to Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc. might not be as accurate as English to Norwegian (or other European languages), but I am sure it is sufficient to understand, and then we could always use the new toolkit to touch up the remaining 2-10% out of context. When I have used Googles Language arsenal to translate my posts into Norwegian, it is if it is reading my mind about what I want to say (except for a few glitches here and there). It is amazing!

I suppose many translators might say these translation tools are not up to mark, but I suppose they are in a way trying hard to protect their profession and pay. But these tools are going to get better and better, and if they arent using such tools to speed up their translation work, or simply arent that good (at translation), they better start looking for a new job and profession. Be smart, use the tools and add your contextualized expertise to perfect the translation (99.97%).

Also, this growing collection of freely available translation tools are going to do wonders in translating Open Educational Resources (OER) to 47 languages (over 98% of the worlds Internet population). Lets use these tools to globalize OER into everyone corner of the world. At least 98% of it!

Translation professionals out there, dont be proud and stubborn, start using Google translator kit (or other better alternatives out there!)! You might argue, it was bad before, but they are getting better, and they might within a few years challenge you word for word to the extreme. Master them now, so when they eventually meet your expectations, you are ready. If you are already using such tools, RESPECT!

Finally, if I had to sum up my opinion on Googles translator toolkit using just one word, it would be:

Awesome!

I mean: Imponente! Ehrfürchtig! Fryktinngytende! Génial! Mengagumkan!مرعب! 可怕的! Nakakabilib! Impressionante! 恐ろしい! Φοβερός!Милый! Dehşet verici! ดีเลิศ! 훌륭한! Imponerende! Ontzagwekkend!