Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
You know what I love about this sign? Obviously there’s just the
hilarious “huh?” factor that comes with translations gone awry. But
what makes it even better is that despite the amusing and imperfect
word choice, you really can tell what it means.
That photo illustrates a fundamental problem we’ve been working on:
your access to information is limited to the language(s) that you
know. If you can’t read English, you can’t make use of more than half
of the web’s information. For example, a searcher in Germany can only
access less than 10% of the web in German. At the same time–and not
surprisingly–the growth of most new web info is happening in
countries like China, where content has been almost doubling for each
of the past three years.
At Yahoo! Search our goal is to make all of the world’s knowledge
available to everyone, regardless of language. With that in mind,
we’ve developed Yahoo! Search Translation Technology (ok, that is a
mouthful), and I’m excited to announce that we’re releasing a beta
product powered by this technology on
Yahoo! Suche Translator.
So what does this really mean? We apply our Yahoo! Search
Translation Technology by taking your query, looking across the entire
Web and across languages to assemble the most comprehensive set of
relevant results, and then returning that information in your local
language. The underlying translation is powered by Systran, just like
our famous Babelfish
translation service.
When you want the most comprehensive set of results that
supplements your local-language information with relevant global
results, that’s when the power of our technology really kicks
in. Check it out for yourself (Achtung! It does help to know some
German, but no worries if you don’t-Yahoo! Search Translation
Technology will be coming to a country near you soon):
- Have some health questions? Try “
zur Nierendialyse” (alternatives to kidney dialysis): with Search
Translator you go from just 1 result to another 140K pertinent results
that are translated back to your local language! - Taking a vacation and looking for places to eat? Search for “
vegetarisches restaurant in San Francisco“: see a 32,000x increase
in relevant results, including those directly from San Francisco and
the local City Search tourist guides. - Or looking for some good recipes? How about “
Ingwer-Kuchen” (ginger cake recipes): a greater variety of recipes
from around the world!
And yes, you will run into the “squeezed of hands” results–it is,
after all, a machine translation. But we’re on it-the technology is
still in its early days, and we’re working on improving the quality of
translations and range of languages we support over time.
As this is launching with our German brethren, I’m also excited to
announce the launch of Yahoo!
Search Blog auf Deutsch which will be at
up with our German-specific progress there and get to know our
international team!
So play with Search Translator. Try a bunch of searches. Tell us
when it’s helpful, when it’s not, and when it just gives you a good
laugh. Share your ideas about how we can make it better. Give us a
sign.
Lesley Kao
Sr. Product Manager
Yahoo! Search
PS: Want more of those signs? Check out one of my favorite Flickr
groups: http://www.flickr.com/groups/engrish/
I have searched some keywords and results in German come always first (”einzelzimmer auf mallorca”, “billig reisen”). In fact, it’s very difficult to find an English link.
Well been playing around a little…I can’t speak German at all. Though I would wonder about the quality of the translation. I’m not used to play around with Bablefish but last time I tried that was not really amazing
I am studying german. It would be nice to see these changes made to the “Yahoo! Suche Translator Beta”:
1) http://img335.imageshack.us/img335/175/yahooidee014zj.jpg
2) http://img319.imageshack.us/img319/3853/yahooidee025iu.jpg
:)
I was wondering why this all of a sudden got a ton of views. I figured it had to have been blogged somewhere, and here it is.