Most information will never be translated by humans from its source language into even one other language, much less into many. Budgets, staffing, and time will always make organizations shy away from translating even a small fraction of the words they have on hand. Many companies and government agencies will use some form of automated translation to improve services to customers and constituencies. However, many information consumers will avail themselves of free online machine translation (OLMT) if they don’t find their language at a website.

Most of that free OLMT to date has been provided by SYSTRAN, a French software firm that grew up during the Cold War as the Free World faced off against the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact. In October new challenges arose from the new guard, including the Russians themselves.

• Google reportedly replaced the languages that SYSTRAN translated for it in favor of its in-house statistical machine translation (SMT) engine. Google’s homegrown technology came into wide view when it won the no-holds-barred NIST Machine Translation Evaluation in 2005. Google’s MT is part of the GooglePlex — that is, not yet a commercially available product, but, like its search appliance, MT could become a Google product. Try it here.
• SMT-based Language Weaver opened its second sales office in Europe. After its initial success selling to certain U.S. government agencies, Language Weaver made its 2006 European debut in bureaucrat-dense, government-rich Brussels. Its latest digs are in Paris, hometown of SYSTRAN — and presumably of some commercial buyers. Free use of Language Weaver on the web is harder to find than Google or SYSTRAN. Earlier this year the company announced that the social bookmarking site Kontrib was using its technology, giving everyone a chance to see its output. Expect Language Weaver to host its own OLMT site as part of its marketing expansion.
• St. Petersburg-based PROMT announced a significant uptick in the use of its free OLMT. This followed its September announcement of V7.8 with support for Windows Vista, while those fortunate enough to speak Russian already have access to Version 8.0 with its improved algorithms and usability. Try its free OLMT.

The bottom line: Most consumers will never buy desktop machine translation software from LEC, PROMT, or SYSTRAN for their PCs, Macs, or smartphones. However, they will have free MT available in the cloud from Google, Language Weaver, LogoVista, Microsoft, PROMT, SYSTRAN , and through portals like Yahoo! BabelFish. How well do they work? Click here for a modest example.