14 Feb 2014

Stop Google Translate

Thirteenth post of my Stop Google series.

What is it?

Google Translate is an online service to translate text from one language to another.

The first service I used to do that was the now dead Babel Fish named after the Babel fish that translates any language to your own language in Douglas Adam’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But that was not an open service either.

I have to admit that when starting this post, I didn’t have any clue if any kind of Open Source services/software/data were available.

I found the following:

Apertium: software and data for translations between pairs of languages. There is also an Apertium online translation website. The available language list is quite limited and related to Spanish as it was originally funded by the Spanish government.
OpenLogos: software for some European languages.
Moses: a statistical machine translation system. Basically, you give it some texts in a language and the translated versions in another language, and the software will learn how to translate from the first language to the second one automagically.
NiuTrans: similar to Moses.

It could be interesting/useful to have a well-trained Moses/NiuTrans system as a web application with an open API.