New translation feature for over 40 languages
Theory Test Pro now available with machine translation support for over 40 languages
Translations have been a popular feature request right from start when we launched Theory Test Pro. However we always knew that this was going to be a complex and expensive feature. Last month we asked people to contact us if they were interested in piloting a new translation service. The good news is that we’ve begun the pilot and can share our translation plans with you.
Translation economics
You might be interested in the costs to deliver a feature like this, so I’m going to be as transparent about this as possible. When we started planning and costing for a translation module for Theory Test Pro it roughly came to £10,000 in development and editorial costs for the first language and then an additional £3,000 per additional language. The feedback from our market research showed that we needed to deliver at least the following most requested languages to make the feature attractive to libraries:
- Urdu
- Arabic
- Gujarati
- Bengali
- Polish
- Hindi
So we were looking at £25,000 initial investment and then more to maintain and update content over time. At this stage there isn’t enough demand to finance this investment – so we’ll have to defer development to deliver a full version of this feature. We’re hoping to look at this again in 2010 though.
In the meantime, we’ve come up with a solution that we hope will still be really useful – it’s called machine translation and it’s available to your users as a pilot feature as of today.
Machine Translation
Supported languages:
Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
Google Translate is a state-of-the-art machine translation engine developed by the Google’s research group. It’s remarkably clever. They feed their learning systems with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. They then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. The results are impressive.
We’re now able to offer machine translations for over 40 languages – and able to deliver half of those on our most requested list (Arabic, Polish and Hindi). Unfortunately we’re not able to machine translate into Urdu at the moment. Urdu is currently the most popular language requested by libraries.
However, we do want to emphasise that this is not a professional translation. Machine translation can aid a reader’s understanding of the text, however it still can not match the fluency of a native speaker or possess the skill of a professional translator.
How can I get translated content?
This feature is already live in Theory Test Pro. To enable the feature your user’s need to go to their Accounts tab, check the Enable Google Translate tick box and then choose a language. Once they’ve saved these settings, translations will appear underneath the original English text.
I’ve made a quick video that shows all this in action. Please feel free to circulate this to your colleagues – and, most importantly, give us your feedback as a comment to this post. The feedback on this feature will be very helpful for informing the decisions we make for fully featured translations in the future.
