The Google Translator Toolkit allows you to organize your documents, obtain machine translations of them, and edit the translations line by line with the help of tools such as a dictionary, a glossary, computer translation, and previous human translations.
What is the Google Translator Toolkit, and how can it help you make better translations than a machine translator would?
The Google Transator Toolkit is a service that allows you to edit the translations that Google automatically generates. You can upload your personal documents, web pages, Knol articles, and Wikipedia articles. Google generates an automated translation, giving you the translated text next to the original, allowing you to edit it sentence by sentence.
The toolkit is designed to help you network with other people who can help you with translation in addition to providing basic machine translation. So, while real human translation will always be far superior to any machine translation, this toolkit is designed to provide input based on past "real" translations as well as machine translation functions, giving you the opportunity for coming up with a better translation. When you do not have access to a native speaker of a language that you can talk with in person, this toolkit can help you.
Finally, the Google Translator Toolkit helps you keep information organized as you work. Its layout is very similar to the Gmail layout, so those used to using Google mail will have an easy time using this system.
To use the Google Translator Toolkit, you will need the following:
- A Google account, which you can easily set up online if you don't already have one. If you have Gmail, for example, you already have a Google account and can sign into that to use the Google Translator Toolkit. Having a Google account will also give you access to the many other translation features of Google Translate.
- One of the following browsers and operating systems, which support the Translator Toolkit. Other operating systems or browsers may work as well, but Google only offers support for these ones:
To install the Google Translator Toolkit, go to the Welcome to Google Translator Toolkit webpage, and log in with your Google username and password. You will be led through a short process of providing your location and time zone to help with translating.
Be aware that it is very important which country you list as your location because it will determine which language you can translate from! If you hope to translate from some other language into English, do not list the United States as your location; if you do, the system will default your translation settings as "from English," and you will only be able to translate from English into other languages. If, for example, you are planning to translate documents from French, set your user location as France.
Please continue to page two to learn how to upload to and translate with the Google Translator Toolkit.