nasavsisro
Active Member
Google is shutting down its Translate API. Read it here.
Important: The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011. For website translations, we encourage you to use the Google Translate Element.
Google decided to shut down its Translate as part of a spring cleaning effort which will shut down over a dozen other APIs as well.
What does this mean? Well all of those ‘free’ programs that hitchhiked on Google Translate are going to be history. What about SDL Trados Studio, which also provides access to Google Translate via the Translate API? Will that service be shut down too? It sounds like it will. But SDL offers two other MT options anyway (Language Weaver and SDL), so it’s not such a big deal for them.
This is dramatic news. Google has acknowledged that the cost of giving away free translations is too much. My guess is that they will eventually offer paid access to their translation services for high volume users.
MT vendors are going to profit from this. Now that the biggest source of free translation is soon to be gone, demand for MT software will increase.
What does this signal to the software development community? People will think twice in future before developing a service or product around a Google API. Lots of startups and companies are going to get burned.
Will this affect our own GTS Translation Plugin? No it won’t. I purposely stayed away from the Google Translate API because I saw something like this coming. I suppose this is great news for us, as most of the other free website translation products will cease to exist in their present form.
