Digital Media

Global company IBM seems to have found a way for its employees to get past language barriers and communicate.

IBM employees are currently using text translation software that can instantly convert documents, Web pages, and even instant messages between English and 11 other languages. The software, christened "n.Fluent," is being "crowdsourced" or tested among IBM's 400,000 employees across 170 countries.

As IBMers use n.Fluent, the software learns from its mistakes and improves itself. As the entire company potentially taps into n.Fluent, volunteers within IBM refine each translated word for greater accuracy. In just two weeks this past summer, volunteers tackled around 1.3 million words, averaging around 100,000 per day. Overall, n.Fluent has translated more than 400 million words for Big Blue staffers.

The software works as a plug-in or add-on to other applications, making it fairly seamless to use. Plug-ins translate instant messages on the fly. Text from a word processing document or other presentation is copied into one field of the software, with the immediate translation popping up in another field. IBMers can use n.Fluent on their desktops, laptops, and even smartphones.

This "universal translator" can currently tackle English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean, Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Arabic.

"To become a smarter planet, the world needs a shared vocabulary for collaboration -- particularly the business community," said David Lubensky, an IBM researcher managing the n.Fluent project, in a statement. "We see n.Fluent as just such a tool, helping to expand commerce, cement relationships and make the world that much smaller, one word at a time."

Of course, free language translators, such as Google Translate, are already available. But IBM sees n.Fluent as a better alternative. The software is more secure as it runs behind a firewall. It's also adept at handling business jargon. Right now, n.Fluent is only being used internally. But like many of IBM's research projects, it's likely to find a home outside of Big Blue's walls.

IBM spokesman Ari Fishkind said there's no fixed date as to when it might be available externally. "It would be a reasonable assumption that there's a demand in the market for a translation tool that has very good security," he said. "And also this kind of tool is uniquely tuned for a business environment that has almost a language in itself."

Other language translation tools can convert individual words. Key to n.Fluent's success will be how it handles entire sentences and paragraphs as well as colloquialisms. But the company's field tests are geared toward those goals.

"The whole point is to continually refine the idioms and the syntax and the context by people who use the language every day," said Fishkind. "And that's part of this crowdsourcing idea where hopefully at the end of the day we're going to have a system that is not only intelligible but also fluent and fluid."

Twitter has the starring role as opening up Net communications about Iran's turbulent politics, but Google and Facebook are jumping in with their its own hasty efforts.

Google is adding Farsi, or Persian, language support to its translation service, the company announced Thursday night. Google rushed out the support specifically because of events in Iran, said Principal Scientist Franz Och in a blog posting.

"We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran," Och said. "Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa--increasing everyone's access to information."

And Facebook produced a beta version of its social-networking site in Persian, Facebook localization engineer Eric Kwan said in a blog posting.

"Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath. Much of the content created and shared has been in Persian--the native language of Iran--but people have had to navigate the site in English or other languages," Kwan said. "We could not have made this happen so quickly without the more than 400 Persian speakers who submitted thousands of individual translations of the site."

Google's translation service so far is optimized for translating between English and Farsi, but Google is working on expanding that to support other language combinations, Och said. A quick test for me showed it workable translating Persian to English.

The Internet lowers barriers between different cultures, countries, and languages, but censors can seriously curtail access to Internet services. Of course, there often are ways to sidestep censors for those with some technical know-how.

Google also has spotlighted citizen journalist efforts on YouTube to document the crackdown on Iranian protesters.

Google has struggled with censorship in China in particular, concluding that censorship cooperation is better than not participating in the market at all.

I fear I'm going to be wasting a lot more time in the blogosphere now.

Google Reader is now automatically translating RSS feeds. It's easy to use too. You just subscribe to a feed in any language and when it appears in your Google Reader you click on the "Feed Settings" tab on the top of the feed and then click "translate into my language." Presto! The feed becomes English.

The translation seemed pretty good on the Spanish-language blog I experimented with. You could tell it was machine translation but it was very readable. I had a harder time understanding a Japanese LOLCATS blog, but that may just be a symptom of the genre more than the translation.

We have glottology expert Brett Bavar at Google to thank for this. He worked on it in the 20 percent time that Google allows engineers to pursue their own projects, with help from the Google Translate team, according to a Google Reader blog post on Tuesday.

Check it out. Apurate!

Google has elevated the profile of its attempt to make videos searchable through speech recognition technology, a move that portends a potentially more financially successful YouTube division.

The speech recognition technology was used in an online application that let people search political speeches launched in July, and now the Gaudi (Google Audio Indexing) project has an official interface at Google Labs.

The site's search box has instructions: "Search what the politicians are saying." The search results are presented next to a YouTube video player, and clicking each result sets the player to show the part of the video where the words were spoken. It doesn't just show speeches--a search for "bridge to nowhere" also returned the "Real Mavericks" ad from the John McCain-Sarah Palin campaign.

Extracting words from videos could make it easier for Google to determine what content is in the video and therefore what ads are most appropriate to show next to them. Making money from YouTube is a top priority this year.

Speech-to-text conversion also could help Google blend relevant videos into search results. Currently, the best way to understand what's in a video is by examining the accompanying metadata, such as titles and captions, but that's often much narrower than what's spoken.

And with Google's translation work, it's possible that the company could transcribe videos' text into other languages.

Clearly, Google has big ambitions for the audio recognition technology. "The aim of Google Audio Indexing on Google Labs is broader (than that of the and the Google Elections Video Search gadget), and the U.S. election is just a first step. We see it as an experiment platform where we can learn what features make the best user experience for people looking for spoken content on the Web," the company said in a frequently-asked-questions page about the Google Audio Indexing project.

Google is beginning with political information because it's trying to become a prominent part of the democratic process and because political speeches receive a lot of attention, the company said. Also, presumably because politicians generally don't mumble as much as the rest of us, the speech recognition technology performs better, Google said.

(Via Google Operating System.)

Google's always up to something, and here's a recap of some recent moves.

• Google is making room for gargantuan display ads on YouTube, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which cites advertising industry sources.

Making money off the popular video-sharing service is a top Google priority this year, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has said.

•  "Transparency" is a hot computing buzzword as everyone from Twitter to SalesForce.com seeks to share information about Web service availability so customers and users don't feel quite so helpless when things go wrong. And Google has showed it got transparency religion while trying to reassure Google Apps customers hurt by an August Gmail outage.

"We've...heard your guidance around the need for better communication when outages occur," Google told Google Apps customers, according to MuleSource CEO Dave Rosenberg, one of those customers.

Specifically, Google is building a dashboard that shows specifics of any outages and an estimated time to fix it. The dashboard should launch in coming months, Google said. The company also will provide customers with a formal incident report within 48 hours and will help out with internal company communications about any outages.

• We knew Google's Android programmers watered down Bluetooth and instant-messaging features from last week's announcement of the software developer kit, but Google has shed more light on the decisions in a blog post.

The company decided to remove the GTalkService interface, which could deal with various instant-messaging features, because it was a serious security vulnerability.

And the Bluetooth interface was removed because "we plain ran out of time," according to Android engineer Nick Pelly. "Rather than ship a broken API that we knew was going to change a lot, we chose not to include it. We absolutely intend to support a Bluetooth API in a future release, although we don't know exactly when that will be...I would love nothing more than to start seeing some neat third-party applications and games over Bluetooth. In my opinion, Bluetooth is completely under-utilized on most mobile platforms and I'm excited to someday see what the developer community can do with Android."

• Google appears to be trying a new way to mix videos into search results, according to Google Blogoscoped. The new technique puts two videos side by side.

• Just as Google's search engine can in effect be commanded to perform specific tasks--"time London" tells you just what you'd expect, and "5+5" tells you "10"--Google's search engine will now translate on demand. Typing "translate jaune" into the engine produces a top result of "Translation for jaune: French » English: jaune - yellow, scab." Google Operating System picked up the change.

• And in case you missed it before, Google's search suggestion feature is now enabled after a period of development at Google Labs. The feature suggests possible searches based on the first keystrokes a searcher types.

Updated 1:17 p.m. to correct that Google ranked first in the machine-translation accuracy evaluation. Updated 10:50 a.m. PDT with Google's no-comment.

Google looks set to launch a beta test of a document translation service, a new move in the company's efforts to break down language barriers.

With the service, the company will connect people who need documents translated with humans who will be paid to do so, according to the Google Translation Center information page. The site was spotted by sharp eyes at the Google Blogoscoped blog.

"Google Translation Center is the fast and easy way to get translations for your content. Simply upload your document, choose your translation language, and choose from our registry of professional and volunteer translators. If a translator accepts, you should receive your translated content back as soon as it's ready," the site said.

Google prefers to rely on computer algorithms rather than humans, so at first glance the Google Translation Center looks somewhat anomalous, even though Google is only playing a middleman role. But it's possible that the human translators might be gradually improving Google's machine translation technology as they work, in effect helping to put themselves out of a job.

That's because Google's translation system uses a statistical model that works better the more it can compare the same text in two different languages. And Google evidently will track translation work in its database; according to the center's introduction for translators, "our translation search feature matches your current translation with previous translations, so you don't have to translate over and over again."

Google is fervently interested in better machine translation. With it, it can use its search technology to link people with data around the world, regardless of language barriers, making its search engine significantly more powerful.

Wanted: More Rosetta Stones
Google's translation technique essentially relies on having as many Rosetta Stone-like documents as possible. The more documents it has in two languages, the better able it is to match words and phrases from one language to another, according to a recent speech by Jeff Dean, a Google fellow who works Google's computing infrastructure.

"By computing statistics over all words and phrases, you...get a model of word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase replacements," Dean said. Machine translation often produces awkward results today, but "the impact of having a really large language model makes the sentences flow a lot more easily."

The screenshot below, from Google, shows the online interface a Google translator apparently will see. It shows text in two languages, with the passage broken down into chunks of text. It also suggests a previous translation of one chunk, offering a "use suggestion" button to employ it. It's not clear if the previous translation draws just on that individual translator's work or a larger collection.

Based on the Bilingual Evaluation Understudy method for rating translation accuracy, Google scored first place in a 2005 evaluation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology evaluation.

Google was mum about the project. "We're always looking at new ways of providing tools for users to connect with each other, share information, and improve access to information on the internet, but we don't have any new details to share at this time," the company said in a statement.

Paying the middleman
It's a time-tested business to be the middleman who connects customers to those willing to pay for a product or service, but the Internet has taken the role to new heights by more easily enabling that process on a national and sometimes global scale. For example, Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, Serebra Connect, and Elance can help companies that need tasks done find people who can do them.

But the Google Translation Center seems to have a different approach. Translators get access to free Google tools, and it appears Google isn't involved in any payment transactions, according to the site.

"Google Translation Center provides a venue for you to enter into and complete translation transactions. Except when you use Google Translation Center as provided in Section 4, Google is not involved in any transactions in Google Translation Center. Your interaction with any third party participant(s) or user(s) within Google Translation Center, including payment and delivery of goods and services...are solely between you and such third party participant(s) or user(s) and Google is not involved in such dealings," according to the terms of service. Section 4, titled "Google Participation," says just that "Google and/or its subsidiaries and affiliates may use Google Translation Center from time to time."

So what's in it for Google?
Of course, Google has a strong search-ad business that it uses to subsidize any number of efforts that may not be profitable for years, if indeed ever. After all, Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

But even if Google doesn't charge a percentage, improving automated translation could be a powerful incentive as Google tries to keep its core product, the search engine, competitive.

Google's translation technology is available through the Google Translate site, but the company also has technology called Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) that builds translation into its search engine.

Search increasingly is the gateway by which people discover what's on the Internet, so building automated two-way translation into the process could open up the very parts of the Internet that today are available but effectively hidden by language barriers.

CLIR can translate a search query into a foreign tongue then translate the answer back into the search results. Clicking a link produces the translated version of that page.

For example, a search in Russian for Tony Blair's biography will present an option, in Russian and presented at the bottom of the search results page, to search pages written in English. Clicking on a link then translates the English page into Russian.

Google executives have given indications recently about just how grand the company's ambitions are for the automated language translation. The company wants people from any major language to understand any other.

"We will eventually do 100 by 100 languages, to take this set of languages and convert to another," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a June talk. "That alone will have a phenomenal impact on an open society," he said, a reference to concerns many have expressed about Google's censored search results in countries such as China.