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Arabic on-the-fly translations

Submitted by Erik Petersen on Tue, 07/08/2007 - 02:29. general software testing | technologies
I have found an interesting link to my Software Testing Spot. One link site calls the Testing Spot 'fun and informative', this link says, well I'm not sure because I cannot read Arabic. Try this. Go to Google advanced search, enter testingspot.net as an exact phrase, then select Arabic as your language, then click the Google Search button.

This will show you an Arabic link site including the Testing Spot. Click on translate this page, then search for spot, and then see an on-the-fly Arabic-to-english almost translation. I can sort of follow it, but 'Is [Toulkit] Mkhaber to another' seems to be arabic-english-via-computer for 'It is a toolkit for testers and others'. I know technical language is hard to translate, but perhaps that's why this is a beta release.. If you go to Google Language Tools , select Arabic to English then translate MKHaber you get ... Mkhaber.

What is really incredible is the on-the-fly web page translation. If you just wamt to see the result, go to here and click on Arabic Testing Spot. If you want to do it yourself (and get the full experience) go to the Arabic Google page then enter Software Testing Spot then click the button with Google on it. Now click on the Arabic text to the left of the Software Testing Spot link, and the whole page appears in Arabic with the formatting of the original.. amazing. Hover over the Arabic sentences and the original English text appears. Wow. Page down to the second subheading, then click on 1996, and the link site is also translated into Arabic. Another link on the same line also gets translated. Amazing stuff. I'm a little suspicious of the translation though given the Mkhaber experience.. For some reason the word you'll stays in English. Curious. If anyone speaks Arabic, I'd love to know how robust the translation is.

At least we are getting real translations now. For a long time , they were just urban myths, including the classic invisible idiot For a good background read this

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one experience with Google Translator and German language

Submitted by Erkan Yilmaz on Tue, 07/08/2007 - 07:29.
Hello Erik,

I do not speak Arabic, but could it be the problem with MKHaber being translated to Mkhaber is because the term is not existent in the database ? ("Google Translator has been trained using the United Nations Documents as a corpus. This corpus is some 20 billion words")

I once had a similar experience
e.g. the German term Spiesser was also translated again to spiesser (also Babelfish did the same) - see here - in the end humans agreed that the best translation term would be square.

About how good the translation is:
16 English sentences were translated into German and about half of them were translated ok (from my point of view). How good this works for each translation is another case, because such numbers do not tell much (e.g. too few input data, ...)

But as you say, it is now possible to have easy access to different language content (e.g. finding out who swears on me :-) ) and that is a great achievement by ALL online translation services.

Erkan YILMAZ

edit 2007 August 21: I have updated the graphic (two new online translation services included)
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