Slaughtering Machine Translators – Who Is Going To Replace Google?

It was a bright spring morning, when birds were singing, trees were shaking and wind was blowing nicely and quietly. New York City was waking up from a short but sweet night’s dream. New York City doesn’t sleep much. So that night wasn’t any different. But that morning was not like anything else. That morning became cruel and sad when the world has heard the news. The linguists and webmasters were taken aback, shocked and stuttered in disbelief. The world has learnt on May 26, 2011 that Google is no longer going to support its free machine translator also known as Google Translate… I was saddened too.

The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011.

The industry was thriving. A bunch of stay at home and not so home developers figured out ways to incorporate Google’s free translator into their applications. People developed free translation copycats left and right. Created dedicated websites such as www.Ackuna.com or tried to incorporate it in mobile apps for iPhone and Android such as ConveyThis for Android . The party was moving on!..

No more. The party is over. Google declared that they will deprecate their API in December 2011, roughly 6 months from now. All the card houses you’ve built will be no longer around. It’s like watching a movie Inception. The dream is collapsing. And it seems for real.

The future is uncertain. Most likely many developers will switch to the other existing machine translation choices supplied by Babelfish and Bing. It will be a long and painful switch and these services perhaps won’t be able to sustain the load. There were three big players. Two will remain. Who knows for how long…

Machine translation was a big plaque for the human translation industry. Granted. Professional freelancers overtly disdain the innovations like Translation Cloud. They are influenced by peers and their opinions gravitate toward wrong conclusions such as this and this. There was a psychological study in WSJ and masses prove to be wrong when they listen to their peers instead of thinking independently.

USA is built as a free country with free thinkers. We disrupt the translation industry in a good way like Netflix does it for DVDs and Amazon.com for retail. As a strong leader of the most successful translation agency: Translation Services USA , I believe I should sustain the resistance and persevere. We should see farther than the most translators can and not fall for their tricks. We have to continue our quest to innovate, and, yes, it will be a bumpy road. In the end, there will be a victory.