Google launches new Arabic translation tool

Google on Thursday announced the launch of the Google Translator Toolkit, an editor that helps translators create Arabic versions of English web pages.

The Toolkit works by providing the user with a automatically translated version of any page - the translator can then correct and improve the translation, check corrections with Google's online dictionary, and publish new web pages to quickly produce Arabic-language versions of web content.

The company said the quality of the translations suggested by the Toolkit would improve over time, as it learns from translators' improvements.

Google has for the last few months been working with top contributors from Wikipedia throughout the Middle East, professionals in Cairo, and volunteer teachers and students at Saudi Arabia's Effat University, to begin to bring more Wikipedia content into Arabic.

Effat volunteers translated more than 100,000 words of Wikipedia articles into Arabic.

These articles were among the most widely searched articles throughout the Middle East, and they were either previously unavailable in Arabic or they were much abbreviated versions of the English articles.

They will soon be available on Wikipedia in Arabic.
 
"This product is a great way to bring our translation technology to bear on a problem we've been trying to help solve for a while now," said Michael Galvez, product manager for the Google Translator Toolkit.

"Machine Translation is a powerful tool, but to provide really high-quality content, we needed to combine the scale and speed of this technology with a human touch. With this product we hope to provide a quick way to bring high quality web pages to Arabic."

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