¡WEPA! Google Wants to Learn Your Kind of Spanish
Giovanni Rodriguez | April 5, 2011 | 1 comments
I got a long email last week from one of my PR contacts at Google, and it was entirely in Spanish. My Spanish is not very strong, so I did what I do on most occasions like this: I read the email once, then ran it through Google Translate.
It's always fun – and very instructive – to do this. Google Translate enables me to check how well I am relearning Spanish while at the same time checking how well Google is doing. For the past couple of years, I've been following Google's progress on this front, and I have been impressed – not just with how well it is learning Spanish, but also with how it's actually doing the learning. Among other approaches, Google Translate has been using crowdsourcing to scale its ability to translate across a broadening range of languages and dialects. You can say that crowdsourcing is the Google way. The more that people use it, the smarter it gets.
Which brings me to the subject of this week's column, which happens to be the subject of the email I