English to Arabic !

I still remember when "ajeeb.com" was the only website that supports the English to Arabic online translation. Today, as we all can see the competition between the web leaders is getting us more and more services. Google and Microsoft Live Labs, are competing again and they both have the service that enables you to translate, words, essays or even websites into several languages.

Earlier today, I wanted to put this service into my weblog so I let the readers to translate my posts into several languages. I didn’t want to make blind decision and use Live’s engine, and deep down I know am not going to use Google’s one. So I ran this small test. I tried to translate one of my weblog posts.. and here are the results !

The original post :

Google's :  

Live's :

 Honestly, if I add one of these two engines to my weblog I would be punishing the Arabic readers !

If you can read Arabic please have a look at the pictures above and you will immediately feel the difference. Now if we take the "noun/verb" problem away which the two engines cannot handle and I don’t really think that it can be handled. We can see that, Google's engine -unfortunately- is much much smarter in translating to Arabic - I didn’t test any other language. Live's engine, doesn’t even taste the language which makes it REALLY hard to read a single translated line ! While Live Translator was trying to dumbly translate word by word to Arabic, Google’s engine, translated my name exactly the way I write in Arabic !

Every time I do a comparison  like this, I end up thinking, do Microsoft developers find it really hard to develop a smarter translating engine !? Do Microsoft Research people (PhD holders) really find it hard to spend some time in reviewing what they have concluded before it goes LIVE !!? We all know how PICKY Microsoft is in hiring new people, and especially when it comes to developers and Program Managers !

The only thing makes it easier on me is, the translator is still BETA.. So, let’s pray it become smarter in the next versions !

Thanks,

a.