Satisfaction of the translation accuracy is "translation Google" tops.

If you try to search for something on the Web, English page is inevitable. Automatic us immediately when such a translation (machine) translation services if there is, very useful.

Say what?

The title and first paragraph is the translation of this article, which is in Japanese. The article says that Google Translate has the highest rate of satisfaction among users in Japan.

The survey was carried out by japan.internet.com and goo Research (weird name, I know). Of the 1,082 respondents, 42.1% had used an online translation tool to read a page that was in English. Google Translate had the highest satisfaction rate (43%), followed by Yahoo Honyaku (38%) and Excite Honyaku (37%).

I did some tests myself, for example by translating the previous paragraph, and came up with some findings:

• Google Translate is the only one to translate "goo Research" and "Excite Honyaku" to its names in Japanese. Yahoo translates the first name to "sticky research".
• Google is the only to have text-to-speech.
• Yahoo Honyaku has an auto-detect function to determine the language, similar to that of Google. The number of languages however is much lower (63 of Google vs. 9 of Yahoo Honyaku).
• Interestingly, Yahoo Japan's Honyaku is completely different from Yahoo's Babelfish.
• Excite also has only 9 languages, and no auto-detect.

The implication of these results is that when you would have to rely on automated translations of websites, Google Translate is the safest bet; the rate of satisfaction is the highest and although I am no language expert I can see that Google's solution has the least amount of errors and fewest strange translations.

Also, a translation tool based on Google's technology can be easily added to your site by using this wizard. This is a very good way of offering your website in different languages while your resources may be limited. In all fairness it has to be said Yahoo offers something similar, which has a cute yellow fish as a logo.

There are some more tools based on Google Translate's technology, but I will discuss those in another post. For now, I would suggest to advertisers that are thinking of targeting Japan, or other countries for that matter, to look into how Google Translate works.

Having said all this, even with the technology of today, a good translation would still need human intervention.  In international advertising, where you want to convey your message as truthfully as possible, you wouldn't want anything to be lost in translation, right?