Google Translation: "Suggest a better translation"

New feature

[zCat]

(Apologies if this is old news, but I haven't found any mention of it).

For laughs, I've just clicked on the "translate this page" flag icon on a website, and noticed if you hold the mouse pointer over a block of "translated" text, up pops a little box with the original text and also a link "Suggest a better translation", which offers you the opportunity to correct the translation and send it off to Google.

Nifty idea, but I wonder what they do with the data. I'd guess it's being fed into their AI or whatever, rather than being used to directly improve the translated site. Anyone know anything more?

[jimbeetle]

Interesting. Were you logged into your Google account or have the G toolbar turned on at the time?

[zCat]

No, just my ordinary Google-free browser profile. (I see this using Mozilla based browsers, FWIW).

[Duskrider]

Hey that's pretty slick. I just tried it on one of my own sites that I use the Google translator on. It goes sentence by sentence and throws a little DHTML window out there to suggest a better translation when you mouseover.

[zCat]

Not sure quite who'd want to dedicate any serious time to this though: anyone competent enough to provide a decent translation isn't likely to be using the translation service anyway. Anyone not competent is going to be providing a different sort of translated garbage; and anyone with a vested interest in a decent translation (website owners) would be better off adding the translation to their own site.

[rustybrick]

From March [googleblog.blogspot.com...]

But it is cool to play with. It seems Google has expanded it to be available in more languages. I just tested German and it worked.