
Google to offer for-pay Translate API - rryan
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-some-of-our-apis.html?foolio
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tlrobinson
If they had just announced they would be charging for it people would also be
upset. By announcing they're shutting it down, then backpedaling a little by
offering to charge for it developers can't be as upset. Genius!

~~~
yhlasx
More to that, now they are the good guys who read all the comments, cared
about their users, listened to their opinions and are changing their decisions
based on those comments. Agreed, Ingenious.

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pasbesoin
Thanks for listening! (I'm assuming some relevant Google folk will be passing
by here.)

A personal qualification: I may be unusual, but my personal concern (as
opposed to professional needs) is use by tools such as the Firefox Babelfish
extension.

At times, I spend significant time in communities speaking any number of
languages. Being able to drag-to-translate various items, pretty much
instantaneously (and without forcing the entire page through a single
translation), makes participation fluid. It also props up my sometimes
dormant, if not non-existent, understanding of those languages.

I hope there is room within the new model to support this, at reasonable cost,
whether through being simultaneously signed in to a Google account (hopefully
with adequate security filtering for the submitted fragments), or other means.

I can't help thinking there's also an educational aspect to similar scenarios.
Always good for a little PR!

P.S. As long as I'm asking, how about HTTPS support?

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DanI-S
I am happy to see Google selling clever things like this. I feel that in the
long term it's their future, more than advertising.

~~~
zmmmmm
I have exactly the same sentiment. One of my big fears about Google is that,
similar to what happened with Java and Sun, they will ride on their easy money
to make cool things and then one day when / if ad revenue dies off (or hell,
even just stops growing) it will all go away or get sold to hostile
competitors.

In this light, seeing Google actively driving commercial sense into their
services and cancelling those that will never fly is, while disappointing,
also reassuring.

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senko
This is great news for MyGengo (<http://mygengo.com/>). They have a free
machine translation API which can be upgraded to (paid) human translation by
toggling a flag.

Granted, they support a lot less languages, but for the supported ones,
MyGengo sounds like a much better option, unless Google manages to improve
their translation _and_ beat MyGengo pricing.

The quality of the Google Translate is awesome, considering it's automatic,
but still falls short of the human doing the job. Also, it'll be interesting
to see what Duolingo (<http://duolingo.com/>) can do, once it launches.

~~~
jcampbell1
>Granted, they support a lot less languages, but for the supported ones,
MyGengo sounds like a much better option, unless Google manages to improve
their translation and beat MyGengo pricing.

As far as I know, MyGengo doesn't do in house manchine translations. Am I
wrong?

~~~
senko
I'm not sure whether they do it in-house or outsource, but they do provide it.
From <http://mygengo.com/services/api/#benefits> page:

 _You can also get free machine translation through our API - so no need to
switch between services. Just pick and choose which of your content you want
done by humans, and which by machines. It’s easy and free to start with
machine translation, and then upgrade for popular content._

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robert_mygengo
Hey guys

We currently source our API's machine translation from Google, but we're going
to be connecting to several other providers in the next few months. Depending
on Google's pricing model we may or may not include them in the roster.

We think it's best to connect to our API, because you can 'upgrade' to human
translation without switching out code (it's just a single parameter in an API
call).

If you want to try us out, we're currently running a $25-credits-free campaign
to switch to our API. [http://mygengo.com/talk/blog/translation-apis-google-
shuttin...](http://mygengo.com/talk/blog/translation-apis-google-shutting-
down-but-are-there-alternatives/)

(CEO, myGengo)

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exch
I'm glad to see the shit storm did not blow over unnoticed. The translate API
is a pretty useful tool and I would happily pay for it. While nothing beats a
hand-written translation by a language pro, the automated version is accurate
enough for many situations I come across.

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bane
I have a feeling their federal sales office out in D.C. would do very well if
they could package this up as a network appliance.

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drx
This made me consider the problem relying on shitstorms for feedback. The
problem might be unrelated (for example, this might have been engineered in
advance as a way of minimizing the negative reception of the decision).

That is, in sufficiently large consumer bases, is it safe to rely on
shitstorms for negative feedback on business decisions?

Some groups have outspoken representatives that can get the word out there so
that it can snowball into something that can be noticed.

However, what if the average emotional response to the decision had been the
same, but no shitstorm was raised? Does it happen often? In what conditions?

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andrewpi
Hopefully they allow some kind of free tier for minimal use.

~~~
woodall
I agree. I really like playing with translation software as the web does not
speak one language. There are, however, loads of free alternative but they are
a bit harder to plug into.

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sidmitra
Interesting, would love to be a fly on the wall at internal discussions at
MyGengo

~~~
jcampbell1
I thought MyGengo was in the business of real translations, not machine
translations. How is this relevant?

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Klonoar
_Full Disclosure: I work with myGengo._

We offer machine translations for free, but also offer human translations for
(IMO) pretty good rates, and they can all be gotten from the API. I assume the
parent comment (of the parent comment of this comment... yeah) was speculating
on how we were planning to deal with Google ever deprecating their machine
translation. :)

tl;dr I don't believe we were ever too worried, as we're certainly no slouches
in the tech department ourselves. Initial shock was there though, definitely a
"wtf" moment.

~~~
sidmitra
Yeah not only that. Now that it might be a paid product, they might start
focusing more on it? and lead to overall improvements, with paying customers
keeping them up at night.

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myth_drannon
It's absolutely unbelievable that for a solved problem we don't have reliable
offerings and need to beg Google/Microsoft for an api access or buy expensive
enterprise software. How difficult is to take one of the thousands open source
translation libraries that every university's linguistics department offers
and turn it to some semi-correct service

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jellicle
If it's that easy, perhaps you should do it in your spare time next weekend.

~~~
myth_drannon
Well I didn't say it's easy (at least to me, I have zero education in machine
translation) but some people spend their entire lives working on it(using our
tax money) and just don't feel the need to make something public facing out of
their projects except dumping the zipped source code on sourceforge.

P.S. And by the way I tried not to use the google api (well before the
announcement) and wrote a basic word by word translation which obviously gives
dismal results (<https://github.com/aparij/bl>)

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peterburk
Great news for YouLing, my mouse-over translator for Mac. I just made it a
couple of weeks ago, and was very disappointed when I heard about the API
closing! <http://goo.gl/MsV4D>

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thatusertwo
a new revenue stream, sweet. To bad Facebook and Bing are winning the web
away.

~~~
thatusertwo
Its true, facebook is making a new type of internet. Its hardly about search
anymore, now people search facebook for content. Social networks are a fad
like anything else but they are winning now.

~~~
steevdave
Wait what? People search on Facebook for content? Maybe for content of what
their friends are up to. I've never considered a social networking site to be
a search engine, and considering Facebook's abysmal attempts at targeted
marketing (their ads SUCK at relevance) no matter how many time I tell it that
a certain ad is of no relevance. I just don't see how Facebook is "winning the
web war". Maybe I have different friends than most, but pretty much everyone I
know uses a search engine to find things. Even my mom, who isn't what I would
call computer savy.

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esrauch
They are winning the web war since their messaging has basically completely
displaced AIM, MSN and GChat in the US in the 16-26 year olds. Its also put a
decent dent into email for asynch communication, and I only expect that to
continue.

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cdcarter
I don't see facebook overtaking email in professional situations for a long
time.

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becomevocal
I Agree. If a business contact wants to get to me through facebook I cringe.
Although I can see the current generation using it in a more professional
sense.

