Google Translator Toolkit

This link came through Twitter this morning. Google has taken one more step towards implementing a web-based translation environment that supports both human and computer-generated translations. Here is a brief description from Google Translator Toolkit Help:

Google Translator Toolkit is part of our effort to make information universally accessible through translation. Google Translator Toolkit helps translators translate better and more quickly through one shared, innovative translation technology.

Here’s what you can do with Google Translator Toolkit:

• Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols.
• Use previous human translations and machine translation to ‘pretranslate’ your uploaded documents.
• Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to improve the pretranslation.
• Invite others (by email) to edit or view your translations.
• Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
• Download documents to your desktop in their native formats — Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML.
• Publish your Wikipedia and knol translations back to Wikipedia or Knol.

How is this different from Google Translate? Google Translate provides ‘automatic translations’ produced purely by technology, without intervention from human translators. In contrast, Google Translator Toolkit allows human translators to work faster and more accurately, aided by technologies like Google Translate.

Here’s a 1 1/2 minute YouTube video that illustrates the main features.

Google Translator Toolkit basics