CompuWorld

Google is famous for the kind of innovative products it has delivered to the Internet community, and it is on the way to deliver another. Everyone knows about the online Google translator which is used by readers to read website content in there native language. We find these translators in many blogs and even in this blog CompuWorld on the right top corner.

Now Google is working on a idea where people will be able to translate documents instantly into the world's main languages.

Google's approach, called statistical machine translation, differs from past efforts in that it forgoes language experts who program grammatical rules and dictionaries into computers.

Instead, they feed documents humans have already translated into two languages and then rely on computers to discern patterns for future translations.

While the quality is not perfect, it is an improvement on previous efforts at machine translation, said Franz Och, 35, a German who heads Google's translation effort at its Mountain View headquarters south of San Francisco.

"So far, the focus is let's make it really, really good," Och said. "As part of a general Google philosophy, once it's really useful and it has impact, then there will be found ways how to make money out of it."

But one should remember that this software may not overtake humans in expert translations as it has in playing chess; it should be used for understanding rather than polishing documents.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt also sees broad political consequences of a world with easy translations.

"What happens when we have 100 languages in simultaneous translation? Google and other companies are working on statistical machine translation so that we can on demand translate everything all the time," he told a conference earlier this year.

"Many, many societies have operated in language-defined communities where they really don't understand and are not particularly sympathetic to other peoples' views because of the barrier of language. We're about to have that breakthrough and it is a huge thing."