Though it’s a little early and too presumptuous to term these the “translate” wars, Google andFacebook seem to be at loggerheads. The company whose growth and dominance over the market quite closely resembles Google’s initial appeal graph is filled with widgets, quizzes, apps and a plethora of features sure to keep you glued to just Facebook.
We wrote a while earlier about language being the new frontier for Web 2.0 to cross. Over the last few years, social media has gone vernacular, with resounding popularity. Baidu.com, China’s leading search engine and the World’s second best (after Google) is testimony to the fact how one good local-language based service can turn the tide.
Now, Google translate has been along for a long time. From phrases to documents, they’ve come a long way. However, Google now has competition from FB. Facebook has just announcedTranslations for Facebook Connect. Facebook launched translations last year with great success as volunteers chipped in to translate it into more than 65 languages. Now, the same technology will power websites and will be released as a free tool for developers. Once enabled, the tool will display content in a visitor’s native language if they log in using Facebook Connect. We had written about the success of Facebook Connect a while back.
However, while Facebook was taking User Generated Content to a whole new level, Google had to make a move. What seemed more like a “We do the same stuff, and we’ve been doing it longer” comment on the blog, they brought out Google Website Translator. While Facebook was touting the speed of their translators (Facebook in French <24 hrs, Spanish in two weeks), Google’s first paragraph reads as “How long would it take to translate all the world’s web content into 50 languages? Even if all of the translators in the world worked around the clock, with the current growth rate of content being created online and the sheer amount of data on the web, it would take hundreds of years to make even a small dent.” in what seems a clear mockery of Facebook’s efforts.
They go on to announce their new website gadget powered by Google Translate. Website owners can now paste a small snippet of code on their sites allowing users to instantly translate the content. Google had the following screenshots to help you understand how the new gadget would work.
Google has an entire Toolkit for Translation and with this new gadget, they hope to lure more website owners to use their tools. A website with support for more than English can increase it’s user base by greater than 50%. In what seems to be a conceding remark, Google admits that while Automatic Translation is pretty convenient, it only lets people get a gist of the page and is not a substitute for professional translation.
What is to be noted is that Google’s armoire is still 14 languages short of Facebook’s impressive arsenal of 65. While both allow for support in Hindi, Facebook in it’s possible attempt to lure Indians also has Bengali, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Tamil. Though it’s a little early and too presumptuous to go over the whole Facebook v/s Google thing, it certainly looks as if these two are going to clash big time.
Lol, just curious how Baidu earned the title “2nd best,” and from whom. Baidu is basically an advertising service with a few searches thrown in; the search results are so filtered and censored that they can’t really be called search results.
I agree that language is an important frontier for Web 2.0, however! But Baidu is more like Web-Gulag 2.0.