The Online Translation Battle
News trickled out this month that Bing Translator had gained Thai support, meaning that users can translate to and from the language in IE8’s Accelerator, with the Microsoft Translator widget, with the Windows Live Messenger bot, with Microsoft Translator for Office, and with the Microsoft Translator API. All in all, it’s good news for anyone who knows the Thai language, though we should note that Google has supported it for some time.
This information prompted us to a do a quick quantitative comparison between the comparable translator services from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Here’s a summary of the three websites:
Google Translate - 51 languages
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish
Bing Translator - 20 languages
Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai
Yahoo Babel Fish - 13 languages
Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish
Regardless of the fact that Google has more languages, it’s important to remember to also compare quality. Assuming that your languages are supported by more than just one service, we recommend that you compare the two each and decide which one works better for you.
We should also note that while Microsoft and Google both allow any combination of two languages they support, Yahoo only allows translating between certain pairs of languages of the ones that it supports. The fact that Babel Fish is behind Bing Translator is not that surprising, even if Yahoo has a higher market share than Bing. Yahoo is hoping for the Microhoo deal to receive regulatory approval from the US and Europe, which will mean that Bing will be taking the reigns of all search from the two companies regardless. For this reason, Yahoo has likely let Babel Fish remain stagnant.
Read more > Google vs The Rest
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