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

See Also

• More about machine translation
  Raw machine translation may be sufficient for communicating via social networks. However, you may have to consider human translation if you require high quality.
• Google Adds Customized Translations for Website Owners
  The Internet is full of human error, but Google is doing its part to curb translation mistakes by relying on human intelligence
• Now you can polish up Google?s translation of your website
  Google launches a new experimental feature (in beta) that lets you customize and improve the way the Website Translator translates your site.