Updated.
Google’s new product” Translator Toolkit” is an awesome product for anyone involved in translating from English to any of the 43 languages it currently supports, including Arabic. Because it is a smart and a faster translation SaaS based suite that is free for anyone to use, and I’ve never seen something like it elsewhere.

Unlike Google Translate which is a machine based, Google Translator Toolkit enables you to use its WYSIWYG editor to edit the machine translation, invite people to collaborate with in your translation efforts, use  transliteration from English to 10 languages including Arabic and many more features. The big thing in the Toolkit is that the translations it offers it is a mixture of  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and  crowed sourced translation.  It can learn from everyone’s corrections and translations, thus as more translators start to use it gets smarter and more accurate, saving you time and effort.

To use in translation with Google Translate Toolkit you can upload up to 1MB for free of Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols or any webpage , when you finish uploading, it automatically pretranslate your document as follows:
1. It divides your document into segments: sentences, headers, or bullets.
2. It searches all available translation databases for previous human translations of each segment.
3. If any previous human translations of the segment exist, it pick the highest-ranked search result and ‘pretranslate’ the segment with that translation.
4. If no previous human translation of the segment exists, it uses machine translation to produce an ‘automatic translation’ for the segment, without intervention from human translators.

Then you can start using WYSIWYG editor a workspace where you can see the original document on the left side if you are using vertical panel or down the page if using horizontal panel. However when I used the editor after I added a webpage from ArabCrunch, the vertical panel did not work well on Chrome but it did great on FireFox.
To quickly distinguish human translations from machine translation,  Google Translator Toolkit uses a gray font for all segments that were originally pre-filled with human translation.

To start editing you click anywhere in the translated page and you will see a box which Google calls
“Translating segment” and the editor will highlight the corresponding segment in the original document in the left panel. This feature eliminates the need to copy and paste the English sentence into a word document and start translating underneath it.

Google Translator Toolkit also offers an automatic transliteration (called Ta3reeb) option for converting Roman characters to Arabic or the Indic characters used in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Tamil, and Telugu. However when I tested it in Arabic it had a problem: you cannot edit manually the word you checked, it only shows you the matching Arabic option. The good thing you can turn transliteration off, which was better off for me. Update 2: Yamli does a better Arabic transliteration job, you can edit easily and it is more accurate, I hope Google ditch Ta3reeb and start using Yamli instead.

The other neat thing I found in the toolkit is “finding and replacing text”, So for example when I used the toolkit to translate “Inside Jo” post on ArabCrunch, it translated the company name into Arabic ” داخل الأردن” but I want to replace ” داخل الأردن” into the English name of the company: “Inside Jo”, so I used the “finding and replacing text” which sounded accurate.

If you are confused about the exact meaning of a specific word, you can use the ToolKit’s “Dictionaries and Glossaries” feature in the” toolkit tab” Dictionaries contain translations coming from Google’s database of multilingual terms, it shows the different meanings of the word.  To use it you need to click show toolkit and then click the dictionary tab. while Glossary translations are crowed sourced from Google Translator Toolkit users. And unlike dictionaries using glossary is more automated: As you translate each segment, the toolkit will highlight the glossary match in the segment if it finds it, to view the translation Hover your mouse over the over the glossary match or click the Glossary. But as Google toolkit is just launched you won’t find now many matches in the glossary.

Glossaries also support bulk-upload of terminology for use with your translations. However they should be stored in a comma-separated value (CSV), UTF-8 format file and each uploaded glossary can be up to 1MB per upload  and you can upload up to 1GB of glossaries per year.

Sharing, publishing and collaboration features in Google Translator Toolkit are also important and time savers for translators.  You can invite many people easily by entering their email address inside the toolkit or workspace and set the permissions they can do with your document : edit, comment or just read. This feature replaces the manual process of having to compare and consolidate each individual translated files, if more than one person is collaborating in translating a document. Instead, collaborating translators can work and edit now a single document.

You and  your team can also insert comments alongside your regular translation and they will be visible to other translators working on the document. Comments are a great way for communicating with collaborators about specific parts of the translation, as well as making notes about changes you’ve made or would like to make. (I expect the collaboration feature will be real time when Google revolutionary real-time collaboration platform “Google Wave” will go public.

When you finish your translation you can publish the document –toolkit auto saves while you work – to Wikipedia or Knol or download it to your hard drive. Though the downloaded format can only be the same as uploaded document ‘s native format. I hope Google will enable format conversion in the toolkit, If they offer an API,  the popular conversion website  “YouconvertIt “ for example can be integrated and finish the job.

As in translating from English into another language is not based on-word-by-word translation but is more based on the understanding of a sentence. Google has an advanced feature called Translation Memory (TM) which is a database of human translations. TMs are saved once you finish translating documents in Google Translator Toolkit. TMs will show in real time as Google help says:  Google automatically search all available translation memories for previous translations similar to your new sentence. If such sentences exist, it ranks and then shows them to you. By default, the toolkit saves your translations to a shared, publicly searchable translation memory, but you can make them  private. And you can also upload your TM, up to 50MB per and with up 1GB of storage space.

These entire features are currently free, but in the future, as the toolkit’s websites mentions, Google plans to charge users whose translations exceed high-volume thresholds. As I mentioned earlier the translation toolkit is great app, it will be the translation application of choice from me. However, besides some of the feedback I wrote in this post, I also would suggest that Google adds, Arabic spell checking and synonyms, so it saves the translator another minute of time to use other websites, application or books to fine tone the translation.

Currently in Google Translator Toolkit’s machine translation supports the  following list of languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

I can also say, that Google Toolkit is the most innovative Arabic solution Google came up with until now.
Here is an overview Video of Google Translator Toolkit; I also recommend reading the help section if you are serious about translating and for more tips in how to use the app.



Update: Official Arabic launch announcement at Google Arabia Blog post.

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