Harry Potter and the Illegal Translation of Text

6/27/2007 10:29:00 AM

Posted by Jay Marciano, Director, Machine Translation Development

As fans of Hogwarts and the magical world of J. K. Rowling eagerly await the seventh and final installment of the wonderful Harry Potter books, it seems a good time to review the terms and conditions of FreeTranslation.com, particularly as they concern the translation of copyrighted material.

The sanctioned translations of the Potter books are generally published a few months after the original appears in print. The wait, of course, can be excruciating for those who can’t simply tap their copy of the book with their wands and shout “Vernaculum!” or some other translation incantation. In the past, we have noticed that merely days after the publication of a Harry Potter book, the FreeTranslation.com servers are heavily taxed by users who are trying to magically produce unofficial translations of the books.

The terms and conditions of this website clearly state that users must promise SDL that the text or other materials submitted by them to FreeTranslation.com do not infringe upon any third party's copyright.

Please keep in mind that the text of a novel is protected by international copyright law. It is illegal to copy the text of a novel without permission of the copyright holder. It is also illegal to produce a “derivative work” without express permission from the copyright holder. A derivative work is any creative work that is based substantially on another work. Translations are derivative works.

How do we know that people are translating Potter material? We can instruct the FreeTranslation.com servers to create logs of unfound words. An “unfound word” is one that is not recognized by the translation technology. If words like “Hermione” or “Dumbledore” or “Voldemort” appear with great frequency in our logs, we can make an educated guess about the content that is being translated.

So, enjoy your reading! But please respect copyright protection. After all, it is the same law that will protect your interests when you write a great novel!

FreeTranslation.com in the classroom

3/27/2007 01:24:00 PM

Posted by Jay Marciano, Director, Machine Translation Development

A FreeTranslation.com user with the pseudonym Spanish Student raised a thoughtful question about whether it is fair to use FreeTranslation.com for homework. The technology behind FreeTranslation.com is a powerful tool. Tools are generally designed for a specific purpose but can certainly be used for unintended purposes. A hammer, for instance, is designed to drive nails but can be used just as easily to break a vase. Automatic translation is intended as a communication tool, not a language-learning tool. So, the real question here is whether using FreeTranslation.com to complete a homework assignment actually helps you to achieve the intended goal of the assignment.

There are many methods, strategies, and even computer programs for learning languages, but there is no way around the fact that it takes a great deal of hard work to become truly proficient in a new language. I remember all too well that homework can be drudgery, so it is not surprising that students would try to minimize the effort by using a translation website. Ideally, though, your homework assignments are designed by your teacher to help you recognize and use the vocabulary and grammar of the new language. If you are serious about learning a new language, then you have to be serious about the homework. With that in mind, I think that using FreeTranslation.com to avoid spending the time and effort that is necessary to learn a language is indeed cheating. But let’s be clear: you are primarily cheating yourself of the opportunity to learn a skill that can be tremendously beneficial. (End of lecture!)

I whole-heartedly agree with Spanish Student that it is a good idea to discuss the use of FreeTranslation.com with your foreign-language teacher. Your teacher might not see any educational value in FreeTranslation.com. But you might find that he or she has been trying to find interesting ways to use FreeTranslation.com in the classroom.

I have often thought that there must be many ways that FreeTranslation.com could be used constructively by teachers of foreign languages. For instance, your teacher could ask you to compare an automatically generated translation to a professionally produced translation. A discussion of the differences could yield valuable insight into the structure of the language or the use of idiomatic expressions.

Or, your teacher could ask you to write sentences in your own language with specific vocabulary items. You could then run your sentences through FreeTranslation.com and compare the translations of the vocabulary items to the information that you find for those words in a dictionary. In a given sentence, FreeTranslation.com will only provide one translation per word, but a good bilingual dictionary will give you many other possibilities. Can you use the information in the dictionary to create a better translation?

Here’s an idea that really sounds like fun: Who in your class can come up with the longest sentence (in either your native language or your new language) that translates well on FreeTranslation.com?

Have you come up with any creative and educationally constructive uses for FreeTranslation.com? If you have, please let us know! We’d be happy to publish your ideas here.

Bidirectional English/Japanese Translation now on FreeTranslation.com

9/28/2006 12:19:00 PM

Posted by Jay Marciano, Director, Machine Translation Development

We have added support for the translation of text from English to Japanese and from Japanese to English! The technology is used on FreeTranslation.com under license from MTLabs, a leading developer of automated translation software for the Japanese market.

There are three scripts that are used to write Japanese, kanji, hiragana, and katakana. The Japanese-to-English translation module recognizes and translates all of these. Western learners of Japanese, however, often prefer the simplicity of using Roman characters to spell out Japanese words phonetically, which is called rōmaji. Please note that the Japanese-to-English translation module does not recognize this writing system. If you try to translate a Japanese text that is written in rōmaji, it simply will not translate.

Enjoy the new language capabilities of FreeTranslation.com!

SDL Enterprise Translation Server 2006, Service Pack 2

6/28/2006 09:30:00 AM

Posted by Jay Marciano, Director, Machine Translation Development

SDL International has a team of software developers and computational linguists that is continually working on the automatic translation technology. Four times a year, we release an update to SDL Enterprise Translation Server. This week we installed SDL Enterprise Translation Server 2006, Service Pack 2, on the servers that provide translations for FreeTranslation.com.

There are a variety of approaches to automated translation. SDL's technology applies grammatical rules and bilingual dictionaries to render translations. So, each new release of the software has improvements to the rules and the dictionaries.

In this release, we have added substantially to the dictionaries, with particular emphasis on English/Italian, English/Dutch, French/English, and Portuguese/English. Each of those dictionaries has thousands of new words and phrases.

The most noticeable linguistic improvement in the rules for this release is the ability of the system to recognize non-contiguous phrasal verbs in English. These phrasal verbs consist of a main verb and a particle. Here “particle” is defined as an adverb that should be parsed as part of the verb even though it can be separated from the verb by certain grammatical elements. The example sentences show, however, that the meaning of the sentence does not change if the particle and verb are separated.

I wrote down your new telephone number on a piece of paper.
I wrote your new telephone number down on a piece of paper.

Because the placement of the particle does not affect the meaning of the sentence, it should also not affect the translation of the sentence. The new version of SDL Enterprise Translation Server correctly identifies phrases such as “write down”, whether or not the verb and particle are juxtaposed.

We have added approximately 500 of these special phrases to the dictionaries of our most popular language modules. You now know one of the phrases (“write down”). Can you find others?

New hardware in response to increased usage of FreeTranslation.com

6/12/2006 09:54:00 AM

Posted by Jay Marciano, Director, Machine Translation Development

Peak usage of FreeTranslation.com is usually between 8:00 and 10:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. At this time of day, FreeTranslation.com receives up to 4,000 requests for translations per minute. Have you ever noticed slower responses during that time? Have you ever received a message that asks you to try again later? If so, then I have good news for you!

I am happy to report that we recently finished the installation one of our biggest hardware upgrades ever. You should notice that translations come back faster than ever before, particularly during peak usage.

Through careful monitoring of the servers, we have been able to track the remarkable growth of traffic on FreeTranslation.com since its inception in 1999. Whenever our monitoring indicates that the level of usage is approaching the maximum capacity of the servers, it is time for some new computers. This investment in new servers ensures that you will continue to get the incredibly fast response that you expect from FreeTranslation.com, even as the number of visitors to the site continues to increase.

Enjoy!