I was once highly interested in the field of machine translation and even worked in that field at a software company in Egypt. I had written an introductory article about machine translation myself. I've always looked with interest on Google's attempts to provide automatic translation of web sites and text.
Now Google is taking a qualitatively different and massive step towards machine translation that might spell the difference between success and failure in this difficult field of research that has proved hard for over 50 years. Google is now allowing users to suggest better translation themselves to the systems! Google's system will learn from such suggestions in order to avoid mistakes in future translation. The great wight I am giving to this approach is because of Google's huge user base. Imagine all those people using Google Translate being able to fix and enhance the translation of the system. Google again is harnessing the power of the people as it did when it made use of the Open Directory and the blogging community and fed on links from both. I think with some time Google will be able to achieve what over 50 years of research in machine translation has failed till this very day to achieve, which is high quality automatic translation of unrestricted text. I am highly excited about this move the the possibilities it would open.
