Website owners and visitors can now edit Google language translations

Google continues breaking language barriers with improvements to its Translate service that lets website owners and visitors amend language translations.

Google has just launched a new feature this week that lets website owners customize the language translation of content on their sites.

The “experimental” plug-in even allows visitors the opportunity to get involved and improve the translated text from the Google Translate website plug-in, once they have obtained approval from the website owner or administrator.

Here’s an example of how it works. The Website Translator plug-in and a customization meta tag must be added to a site. Then, when using the Google Translate service, users can hover over a translated sentence, view the original text and click ‘Contribute a better translation’ if they spot an error.

"While we've kept improving our machine translation system since [launching], we may not reach perfection until someone invents full-blown Artificial Intelligence," Jeff Chin, a Google Translate product manager, wrote in a blog post.

“In other words, you’ll still sometimes run into translations we didn’t get quite right.”

Chin said the changes were in keeping with Google's aim of removing some of the language barriers that affect the internet today.

Alex Dupont

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