Via Google in Translation Pact for European Patents – ABC News.
Google said Thursday it has reached an agreement with European patent authorities to use its online technology to translate some 50 million patents.
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Mountain View, California-based Google will gain access to all the translated patents – more than 1.5 million documents and 50 000 new patents each year – which will help improve its machine translation technology. Moreover, it will also deal with the growing amount of technology-related information in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian.
It’s no secret that Google’s ambition for cataloging the world’s information encompasses every language. Through many efforts, including its translator toolkit, Google has been gathering raw data on translations from professional translators. Since teaching a computer grammar and syntax logic has not brought new gains, the best approach seems to be to mimic. That is, if Google’s computers can see enough examples of proper translations done by professional translators, eventually the computer can simply cut and paste phrases and put it all together.
As a patent translator, I wouldn’t be scared by this just yet. Google’s machine translation still has a long way to go before it can truly understand us mere mortals. Take a look at the following machine translation for a shipping product in Apple’s iPhone App Store.
For those who don’t read French, it says “Now available in unemployment insurance French!”
<joke>Insert French unemployment joke here</joke>
