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Google Deprecates Translation API
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."
not profitable.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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.
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.
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?
I think auto-translating a company website would be more likely to drive the espanol(sic)-speakers away.
No sig today...