New Translation Services Come to MS Office and JaJah

Automated translation services seem to be getting more and more traction these days. Today, we saw announcements about new translation related products from both Microsoft and telephony service JahJah. Microsoft announced that it will be giving its users a free update that will integrate Windows Live Translator into MS Office 2003 and 2007, while JaJah is now offering free voice translations from Mandarin into English through JaJah Babel.

While JaJah doesn't specifically pitch this new service in the context of the Olympics, it is obviously releasing this just in time for the opening ceremonies.

Microsoft Office

Out of the two announcements, Microsoft's is probably the least exciting, but, on the other hand, there is a good chance that it will see a lot more actual use than JaJah's voice translation. The Microsoft Research Machine Translation team has just released this update to MS Office 2003 and 2007 to the Office team for integration, but they already offer instructions on their blog for setting this up yourself without having to wait for the official update.

The integration with Windows Live Translator allows you to translate English texts into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as vice versa. We have tested the Windows Live Translator and the translations were generally about as accurate as you would expect from machine translations. There are various mistakes and words it doesn't recognize, but overall, the translation is relatively readable and gives you at least some impression of the original text.

JaJah Babel

JaJah Babel is clearly the sexier product of the two. You can call access numbers in the U.S., England, or Australia, and after a voice prompt, you simply speak the text you want to be translated into Mandarin. The service will then replay your message, you acknowledge the accuracy of the input, and after a short delay, you will hear the translation. Given our general lack of knowledge when it comes to Mandarin here, we can't vouch for the accuracy of the translation, but the service itself worked very well and seemed to understand at least our initial input accurately.

If you are in China, of course, the fact that you have to call an international number to get this to work is a bit of a limitation.

Other Translation Services

There seems to be quite an interest in working on consumer oriented translation services right now. Just yesterday, we wrote about Mloovi, which translates RSS feeds trough Google Translate, and earlier last month, we wrote about the collaborative dictionary and translation service Lingro.

Babel Fish

JaJah's product is especially interesting here because it takes speech as its input and it will get even more interesting once it works for other languages beyond Mandarin as well. JaJah is offering this service based on IBM's technology, and given IBM's expertise in doing voice-to-voice translation, it will probably only be a matter of time before we see support for more languages. Besides other projects, IBM already supports the U.S. Army with an English to Iraqi Arabic translation service.

There has always been a lot of hype around the possibilities of instant voice translations, but very few products were ever good enough to make it in the consumer/business market. JaJah represents a major step forward here, even if its voice prompts make the service a bit less frictionless than the science-fiction ideal if autmated, instant translation.

Offer Personal Content Recommendations for Free with New MyBlogLog Plug-in

Personal recommendations of targeted content are something almost every publisher would like to offer their site visitors. It's hard though, to know who those visitors are and what they really like. That task just got easier today with the release of a WordPress plug-in called "Just for You," built by the team at Yahoo's MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog has more personal information about millions of blog readers than any other system we know, it's ripe for offering this kind of service and we're excited to see it come to fruition.

How It Works

Just for You is on one level a pretty simple service. When a MyBlogLog visitor visits a site with the plug-in running, the system looks at the tags that user provided for their interests when they created their MyBlogLog account. It then finds blog posts with the same categories or tags and serves them up in a widget.

Right: MyBlogLog's Ian Kennedy is using the plug-in on his blog and it knows I like RSS. Oh yes I do.

The most interesting part, though, is it recommends posts with different but similar tags as well. "The weighting for a user's interests ranges from 10, a direct match between your posts' tags/categories and their MyBlogLog tags to 1, a loose coupling," the MyBlogLog team says. The company wouldn't tell us how exactly it does this analysis, but the algorithm was built by two members of the Yahoo! Bangalore team, Mani Kumar and Saurabh Sahni. It's very cool.

When non-MyBlogLog visitors come to your site, they will be shown recommendations based on tags from the most recent MyBlogLog users who have been there. That sounds like a good solution.

We asked the MyBlogLog team if they were going to offer further recommendations based on tags found in other accounts users have associated with their MyBlogLog profile, like Delicious or Last.fm. They said they had some top secret magic in the works for that. We'd also love to see a plug-in for other blogging platforms, like MovableType for us here at RWW.

MyBlogLog - an Incredibly Important API

MyBlogLog is a fascinating service. People expose an incredible amount of personal information about themselves in exchange for being able to see the faces of people who read their blogs. It's big outside of tech circles, too.

When the service launched its API in January, we said it was going to be a big deal. When Yahoo's Kent Brewster built the BlogJuice widget, we found functionality that we continue to use almost every day here at ReadWriteWeb. Why, we wonder, are all the coolest things built on the MyBlogLog API being built in house at Yahoo! and not by other members of the development community at large? The company says they don't know, if developers have thoughts we'd love to hear them.

Just For You is a great example of what this API can do. There are countless companies that have raised millions in venture capital to offer publishers recommendation systems for their readers - commercial publishers pay big money for this functionality. Now bloggers can have the same type of thing for free and base recommendations on the self-identified interests of their readers. That's really powerful.

We continue to be impressed by what this team is able to do with user data. This is just the kind of thing that gets us really excited about the web.

Garfield Minus Garfield: From Web Sensation To Book In Less Than A Year

What About Copyright Issues?

With today's obsession with our "culture of ownership," where everything from the music we listen to the photos used in blog posts to the blog comments themselves are "owned" by someone and have varying rights of use associated with them, you would imagine that such a creation as "Garfield Minus Garfield" would have been shut down by the copyright cops long before it had a chance to create an online following.

However, that was not the case and the reason is because Jim Davis, who pens the original strip, was actually intrigued and pleased with the concept. He even went so far as to thank Walsh, saying: "I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: 'Oh, I could have left that out.' It would have been funnier."

Now, the online strip will make the move to the printed page. Thanks to Davis' involvement and admiration for the Walsh's version of the comic, Ballantine Books will soon be publishing a book inspired by "Garfield Minus Garfield." In the book, readers will see both the original strip and the one in which Garfield has been removed. Walsh will contribute the forward to the book.

Allowing Art To Flourish

Something about this news brought to mind a recent Wired article on an entirely unrelated subject - the Personal Genome Project. There was a quote from George Church of Harvard Medical School, which was about openness as it related to technology: "sharing technologies by distributing them as widely as possible with minimal restrictions on use encourages both the adoption and the impact of a technology."

Arguably, sharing with no restriction on use has implications far beyond just technology - it can impact art as well. Whether or not you want to classify "Garfield Minus Garfield" as "art" is up to you, but by not clamping down on the copyright, Davis allowed a whole new creation to come into existence...and one I read with enthusiasm every day.

Will Davis' respect and willing embrace of the modified strip have any greater ramifications in our society as to change our perceptions about what it means to own a thought, idea, or creation? Will it affect our opinions on when that ownership should or should not be restricted? Sadly, probably not. The belief that because you created or thought of something gives you control over it is instilled so deep into our communal thinking, especially here in the U.S., it will take more than a new comic to retrain our thoughts on the subject. It only speaks to what could be.

The Garfield Minus Garfield book will be published simultaneously with the Garfield 30th anniversary book in October of this year.