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Google Deprecates Translation API

Posted by Unknown on from the no-api-for-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google is to close down its popular Translate application programming interface — along with a host of others — by the end of the year, owing to what it claims is 'extensive abuse' by users of the service, but has thus far declined to provide details or a sensible alternative for users of the API."

16 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Abuse? by zero.kalvin · · Score: 2

    How the hell can you abuse a translating service ? To rickroll people of different cultures ?

    1. Re:Abuse? by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 2

      You can hijack it to transparently translate your own webpages for users without crediting Google, I suppose. If you do it wrong (that is, issuing the request FOR EVERY PAGE VIEW and doing no caching at all) it could definitely be considered abuse.

    2. Re:Abuse? by Bloodwine77 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      One example is if you are in charge of the company website and the boss tells you, "We need all the pages to be available in espanol, because we're getting more non-English-speaking customers"

      An easy way to accomplish this with minimal work is to output buffer everything, send to a translation service, and then turn around and spit out the translated HTML instead of the original HTML.

      I can't remember which service, Babelfish I think, but you could send all your HTML to them and it was smart enough to not translate HTML tags and only the content itself. Then, they realized that everybody was using them in such a manner so they added a character length limit to translations, I believe.

      You were then faced finding another service, such as Google Translate, or actually set up an official integration with Systran and pay them for translation services.

      I suspect the era of finding workarounds and piggybacking off of free translation services are coming to an end.

    3. Re:Abuse? by Unending · · Score: 2

      Google translate makes a rather nice proxy if you are behind a filter and don't want to bother with a better proxy.
      It's a commonly known trick, I'm sure Google doesn't appreciate it though.

    4. Re:Abuse? by Elf+Sternberg · · Score: 5, Interesting

      SEO abuse is certainly one of them.

      Google has been clamping down on low-quality aggregation sites, as we all know. One way to avoid looking like a low-quality aggregation site is to (a) create a vast farm of low-quality aggregation sites, (b) harvest high-quality articles from other sites, (c) run those articles through Google translate, (d) repost them to your farm. Because they don't look like the originals (being translations) they get around Google's "recognize repeat content" filters. Google uptakes them as original content.

      Delicious has been filled with links to these in recent weeks, mostly because Delicious once had a decently high reputation as a site of quality linkage, and lots of people had trust in it.

      --
      If you're so smart, why aren't you naked?
    5. Re:Abuse? by Adayse · · Score: 2

      You can take harvested content, translate it into lots of other languages and present it back to Google. I would imagine that the translation both makes the copying harder to detect and messes with the translation engine itself. There are modules for wordpress that make automatic translation easy to add to any blog so it might be that a decent chunk of the properly tagged translations on the web are automatic Google efforts harmfully feeding back into the algorithm.

    6. Re:Abuse? by Joce640k · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think auto-translating a company website would be more likely to drive the espanol(sic)-speakers away.

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      No sig today...
    7. Re:Abuse? by gmack · · Score: 2

      Most of the Android translation apps are really just a wrapper around Google translate. There are hundreds of the blasted things and they have the audacity to charge you for it when Google is doing most of the work for free. I wouldn't be overly surprised if those apps were a large part of the reason Google is shutting the service down.

  2. translation - by Lead+Butthead · · Score: 4, Insightful

    not profitable.

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    ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
    1. Re:translation - by StikyPad · · Score: 2

      Did you use Google Translate for that translation?

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      https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
  3. Apertium by paugq · · Score: 2

    Then use Apertium, they also provide an API

  4. Just one more bit of proof by TheRealQuestor · · Score: 2

    that relying on others for anything, ever, is going to come back and bite you in the ass later. Be it cloud, public api, or anything that somebody else controls.

  5. Sad day... by Short+Circuit · · Score: 2

    "Translation Party" was awesome, and it led me to figure out how to use translation tools reasonably effectively to communicate to people with whom I don't share a common language.

    (Keep re-wording one's English form until it survives a round-trip intact. Won't necessarily work for some languages, but it seemed to produce good results)

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    tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
  6. Re:Misleading... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's not at all the same. The old service was an API usable from any program. This new thing is a component that can be used on web sites. You can't use the new component in applications the same way the API could. Google also did the same thing with another service; the search API. They've removed the search API and are calling a custom search box for websites the replacement. No Google, that is not a replacement. They're fools if they think they're fooling anybody.

  7. Alternatives? by rjstanford · · Score: 2

    More to the point:

    but has thus far declined to provide details or a sensible alternative for users of the API

    Just because they used to offer a free service, and will soon stop doing so, people aren't just offended at that but are also attacking them for not recommending a competitive service? Again, all with absolutely no compensation?

    I know they're doing well, but that doesn't mean we (as a society) should start assuming that they owe us.

    --
    You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
  8. So we're back to screen scraping? by dlingman · · Score: 2

    Well, given that they have an alternate way to use their service (their translate element), how long do you think it's going to take someone to wrap that in a externally accessible api, that opens the code, and clicks the button for us, then processes the resulting text. Screen scraping has been around for a long, long time.