myGengo Blog

Full disclosure: I currently work with the company detailed below (myGengo).

Depending on your needs, you could consider human based translation, which is generally more accurate than machine-based translation. Over at myGengo (http://mygengo.com/) we offer an API to help people get translations done by an actual translator, as opposed to a machine (think Mechanical Turk, but focused on translation). Feel free to check it out - various libraries abound:

http://mygengo.com/services/api/

An advantage to going with this approach is that the myGengo API can also return a machine translation while a job is being worked on; a takeaway here is that even if a service like Google shuts down, it should be fairly simple to use another service behind the scenes, keeping a nice level of transparency for you.

Of course, if you'd like to stick with general machine translations, you could check out the following - should be close enough:

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/

Hey guys

We currently source our API's machine translation from Google, but we're going to be connecting to several other providers in the next few months. Depending on Google's pricing model we may or may not include them in the roster.

We think it's best to connect to our API, because you can 'upgrade' to human translation without switching out code (it's just a single parameter in an API call).

If you want to try us out, we're currently running a $25-credits-free campaign to switch to our API.
http://mygengo.com/talk/blog/translation-apis-google-shutting-down-but-are-there-alternatives/

(CEO, myGengo)

(full disclaimer - I work at myGengo)
myGengo (http://mygengo.com) tests translators and does quality-checking for multiple levels to ensure customers are happy with the output. We also allow customers to rate translators and - I'm trying to be honest here - we're almost embarrassed to show the feedback comments because they sound too good (http://mygengo.com/talk/customers/testimonials).

Customers also have the option to request changes / corrections, and even to reject if they are not fully satisfied.

Anyways, just an alternative solution. The online-translation market gets interesting by the day :)

This is great news for MyGengo (http://mygengo.com/). They have a free machine translation API which can be upgraded to (paid) human translation by toggling a flag.

Granted, they support a lot less languages, but for the supported ones, MyGengo sounds like a much better option, unless Google manages to improve their translation and beat MyGengo pricing.

The quality of the Google Translate is awesome, considering it's automatic, but still falls short of the human doing the job. Also, it'll be interesting to see what Duolingo (http://duolingo.com/) can do, once it launches.

Here are a few of my favorite crowdsourcing links. They're not all directly related to Mechanical Turk, but you may find them interesting.

Research on crowdsourcing complex tasks, such as writing articles (open source):

http://smus.com/crowdforge

A company that adds an automated quality layer and/or automated peer review layer:

http://www.crowdflower.com

Crowdsourced translation:

http://www.mygengo.com

Audio transcription through MTurk:

http://www.castingwords.com

Crowdsourcing scientific research:

http://www.hypios.com/

A good alternative to this that I have used is myGengo's free localization tool, String (http://mygengo.com/string/). It allows you to upload various types of lang files, and collaborate with translators working in multiple languages from a simple UI. You can also create public projects so community members can view and request access. Codeligniter, amongst several others, have done this to translate their language packs(http://mygengo.com/string/public_projects)