Google has begun using Web site translation methods that approach the complexities of making the Web easier  to use in languages other than English using some of the same tactics that have made the Mountain View, California-based Internet giant the world's most-used search engine. "At Google, we like search. So it's no surprise that we treat language translation as a search problem," Shankar Kumar and Wolfgang Macherey, two Google researchers wrote in a message posted Tuesday on the company's research blog. Improving Online Services For Users Outside U.S. With the majority of the searches conducted on Google already coming from nations other than the United States and the number of Internet users in Asia and other regions outside the U.S. growing rapidly, Google has increased efforts aimed at giving the Web a more global user interface, through a slew of translation, voice recognition and online text reading initiatives. In October Kumar, Macherey and fellow Google researcher Franz Och authored a translation language mapping report along with Roy W. Tromble of Johns Hopkins University Department of Computer Science, entitled "Lattice Minimum Bayes-Risk Decoding for Statistical Machine Translation," in which the four outlined methods to "build statistical models of how one language maps to another." The report, published in the proceedings of this year's Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (and available online through the Web site of the Association for Computational Linguistics as a .PDF file) detailed methods Google is expected to use to improve the success rate for translations. The techniques outlined were especially well-suited to Arabic-to-English, Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese translation tasks, according to the report. Google and other large technology companies in the U.S. have allocated more resources during the past several years to tackling Web translation issues and to building new online services for people outside the U.S., especially China, which surpassed the U.S. as the nation with the most Internet users earlier this year, and India, which is expected to nudge into the third spot by 2012 according to research firm Jupiter. Google Improves Web Translation Using Search-Like Solutions In the report Google made available Tuesday, Kumar and his fellow researchers said the new methods they had  tested could "compactly encode a huge number of translation hypotheses," and improve language translation by trying to "diversify even more." "We look at a sample of the best candidate translations," the report noted, "and choose the safest one, the one most likely to do the least amount of damage," in order to offer the best translation quality, according to the report. "We believe this could be possibly employed when designing discriminative training approaches for machine translation," the research team added. In China Google has trailed well behind Baidu for search engine market share. China's Baidu held a 65.8 percent share of that country's search market in October, according to research from market analysis firm China IntelliConsulting Corporation, nearly tripling the 22 percent share held by Google, while another research firm, Analysys International, placed Baidu's share of the search engine marketplace by revenue for the third quarter at 63.4 percent. Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo expanded its services in India this year with the May launch of an expanded search engine service called Yahoo Glue Pages. Related Links:
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