Google Translate
Google Translate is the service offered by Google,
to translate sentences, web sites and complete texts between an ever-growing
number of languages. At the time of writing the list includes more than 50
languages, from Albanian to Yidish, including of course all the major
languages (see Languages available for translation). It's translation produced
by state-of-the-art technology, without the intervention of human
translators. Google's research group has developed its own statistical
translation system for the language pairs now available on Google Translate.
As opposed to user-generated translation memories on one side (like in the
case of OmegaT) or rule-based systems (usually found under the name of
"machine translation" or MT in short) Google can afford a different approach:
they feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in
the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human
translations between the languages. Statistical learning techniques are then
applied to build a translation model, achieving very good results in research
evaluations.
The quality of the translation of course depends on one side on the reservoir
of target-language texts and the availability of their bilingual versions, on
the other hand on the quality of the models built. It is pretty much certain
that while the quality may be insufficient in some cases, it will definitely
get better with time and not worse. Even today's most sophisticated software,
however, doesn't approach the fluency of a native speaker or possess the
skill of a professional translator. Automatic translation is very difficult
due to context problems (the sentence "Time flies like an arrow" being just
the best known example for it), it may be some time before anyone can offer
human quality translations.
The OmegaT user is not forced to use Google Translate. If used, neither the
user's decision to accept the translation nor the final translation are made
available to Google. The following window shows an example of a) the English
source b) Spanish and c) Slovenian Google Translate translation.

The Spanish translation is better than the Slovenian. Note interesar and navegar in Spanish, translating the verbs
interest and sail correctly. In the Slovenian version both
words have been translated as nouns. Remember however, that the difference is
solely due to the fact that there's far more bilingual material available for
the Spanish language than there is for Slovenian.
How to use Google Translate in OmegaT
To activate its use, check the
Google Translate menu entry in Options to on. When using it the first time,
you will need to execute "Restore Main Window" - last menu entry in Options.
If the Google Translate pane is not opened, click on "Google Translate" in
the line at the bottom of the window to open the pane. Adjust its position
to your liking.
From now on a suggestion for the translation will appear in the Google
Translate pane for every new source segment opened. If you find the
suggestion acceptable, press Ctrl+M
to replace the target
part of the opened segment. In the above segment, for instance,
Ctrl+M
would overwrite the Spanish version with the Slovenian
suggestion.
If you do not want OmegaT to send your source segments to Google to get
translated, uncheck the Google Translate menu entry in Options.
Google Translate trouble shooting
If there's nothing appearing in the
Google Translate pane, then check the following:
- Are you online? You need to be online to be able to use Google
Translate.
- What is the source language? Google Translate may not as yet be able to
offer its services for it.
- Check Google Translate online for your language pair. Does it
work?