Google’s vertical markets director, Jeff Levick, highlighted the importance of translation, machine translation in other words, during the “Future of Search” panel debate at London’s AdTech, which I was fortunate enough to moderate.
Jeff pointed to the fact that there are twice as many Chinese speakers in the world as English – not all the world speaks English. And there are great information resources in Chinese and Arabic, he said.
If Jeff mentions this in public during this kind of conference, it can only be assumed that something more is coming from Google in terms of translation tools – so watch this space or international roll out.
The three speakers, Stephen Taylor from Yahoo and Chris Ward from MSN were also on the panel, all agreed that social search and personalisation are important themes for the future – the importance of the marketer in the process was also particularly noted.
Andy Atkins-Kruger
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[…] Translation important for the future of search, says Google’s Jeff Levick at AdTech London […]
[…] If Jeff mentions this in public during this kind of conference, it can only be assumed that something more is coming from Google in terms of translation tools." More . . . […]
We’re seeing some very exciting developments in the way information is translated. At the moment, however, machine translation simply isn’t good enough for most important messages. The real area in which technology currently helps in translation is by making professional translators more efficient. As time goes on, we’re finding more attempts to combine the efficiencies of automatic translation with the work of professional translators, and as this relationship becomes closer and more tightly integrated on a global scale, the volume of quality translation that takes place in an automated or mostly automated way should increase dramatically. I’d be very happy if this trend could stop people thinking of shoddy menu translations when talking about my industry 😉
Spot on post Andy for Multilingual Search. According to Internet World Stats, English is used by only a third of the internet population. The next closest is Chinese with 13.3%. That gap is closing however since Chinese users have a mere 10.8% penetration rate compared to English users 28.7%. I think machine translation has a long way to go and working with native speakers for translation of your web content is crucial.