Google Translator Toolkit was an online

computer-assisted translation Computer-aided translation (CAT), also referred to as computer-assisted translation or computer-aided human translation (CAHT), is the use of software, also known as a translator, to assist a human translator in the translation process. The tr ...

tool A tool is an Physical object, object that can extend an individual's ability to modify features of the surrounding environment or help them accomplish a particular task. Although many Tool use by animals, animals use simple tools, only human bei ...

(CAT)—a

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

designed to permit translators to edit the translations that

Google Translate Google Translate is a multilingualism, multilingual neural machine translation, neural machine translation service developed by Google to translation, translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a web applic ...

automatically generated using its own and/or user-uploaded files of appropriate glossaries and

translation memory A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The trans ...

. The toolkit was designed to let translators organize their work and use shared translations, glossaries and

translation memories A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The trans ...

, and was compatible with

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HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, and other formats. Google Translator Toolkit by default used

to automatically pre-translate uploaded documents which translators could then improve.

Google Inc Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

released Google Translator Toolkit on June 8, 2009. This product was expected to be named Google Translation Center, as had been announced in August 2008. However, the Google Translation Toolkit turned out to be a less ambitious product: "document rather than project-based, intended not as a process management package but simply another personal

tool". Originally the Google Translator Toolkit was meant to attract collaboratively minded people, such as those who translate Wikipedia entries or material for

non-governmental organization A non-governmental organization (NGO) is an independent, typically nonprofit organization that operates outside government control, though it may get a significant percentage of its funding from government or corporate sources. NGOs often focus ...

s. However, later it was used widely in commercial translation projects. A review of the toolkit in ''Multilingual'' noted: "The significance of the Google Translator Toolkit is its position as a fully online

software-as-a-service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike oth ...

(SaaS) that mainstreams some backend enterprise features and hitherto fringe innovations, presaging a radical change in how and by whom the translation is performed". Translator Toolkit was shut down on December 4, 2019.

Source and target languages

The Toolkit began in June 2009 with only one source language—English—and forty-seven target languages, but later support 345 source languages and 345 target languages for approximately 100,000 language pairs. Google Translator Toolkit's user interface was available in eighty-five languages:

Workflow

To use Google Translator Toolkit first, users uploaded a file from their desktop or entered a URL of a

web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...

or Wikipedia article that they want to translate. Google Translator Toolkit automatically 'pretranslated' the document. It divided the document into segments, usually sentences, headers, or bullets. Next, it searched all available translation databases for previous human translations of each segment. If any previous human translations of the segment existed, Google Translator Toolkit picked the highest-ranked search result and 'pretranslated' the segment with that translation. If no previous human translation of the segment existed, it used machine translation to produce an 'automatic translation' for the segment, without intervention from human translators. Users could then review and improve the automatic translation by clicking on the sentence and fixing a translation, or using Google's translation tools to help them translate by clicking the "Show toolkit" button. Users could view translations previously entered by other users in the "Translation search results" tab or use the "Dictionary" tab to search for the right translations for hard-to-find words. In addition, translators could use features like custom, multi-lingual glossaries and view the machine translation for reference. They could also share their translations or invite them to help edit or view their translations. Translations could be downloaded and, for Wikipedia articles, published back to the source pages.

API

Google Translator Toolkit used to provide an

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

which was restricted to approved users only.

References

{{Reflist Translation databases