Google Translation API is no longer free
Saturday, 27 August 2011
Google Translate is used by many to quickly translate chunks of text, when a real translator is not available. Googles API-service was however abused so much that Google decided to discontinue free access to this API-service. You can still visit the translation-site, but their API is available only against a small charge.
Translating your content ... automagically
Maintaining multilingual sites is difficult, and unless you can invest in translation teams, you're stuck. Luckily there are online translation services available like Google Translate. It's not perfect, but it might fit the job. However, when you want to stick with the Google Translate website, you need to keep cutting and pasting your text. And that can become a very tiring job when dealing with huge quantities of text.
Using the Translation API in your frontend or backend
It would be much cooler to just translate the text automatically. Using the Google Translate API you can. We - for instance - have developed a GoogleTranslate extension for Magento, which allows you to easily translate text from within the Magento backend.
Oher extensions (or solutions) offer frontend translations, meaning that the page will be translated automatically when showing it to your visitors. We decided to offer the translation in the backend only, to make sure text modification is still possible (which is needed a lot when you want to make sure your translations really make sense).
API access is now only available against a fee
While this Google Translation API offers many cool solutions, it has been abused also a lot. Wondering how you can receive German spam-mails on Korean-made Viagra? Most likely the spammer just targetted a German database with a mail translated using Google Translate.
Pricing of Google Translate API
So Google made the change to only offer their Google Translate API against a fee. Their pricing seems ok, but it is still money to be paid. You need to pay 20 US dollars for 1 million characters. When you're translating a site with only 50 pages, this is probably still a good investment. But with a huge site, the investment might become too big.
Automatic translation of your frontend is definitely costing you: It would mean that every time a visitor is translating your site into whatever language, that you will be charged. Even more hilarious, you will be charged for every time the Google crawlers will be reading your site. Surely, frontend translations will die out, but backend translations (involving that the Google Translate API is only used when you as administrator decide it) will still be a good option.
Who is Google kidding?
While it makes sense that Google tries to defend its APIs against abuse, it sounds a bit silly. Here is this billion-dollar company, which owns thousands of servers to keep alive this free Google Search engine. And they are complaining about abuse? There are several blogs already on the Internet, judging this move and blaming Google for just trying to make money out of it.
An alternative: Bing from Microsoft
Luckily there are alternatives. Microsoft has developed a similar service called Bing Translator - and while there is still a discussion going on whether their translations are as good as Google Translate, they offer a good second option. They also offer an API for developers, and it is free.
Besides our Google Translate extension for Magento, we therefor (logically) also developed another extension Bing Translate for Magento. Ofcourse, no one knows whether Microsoft will continue their API-service for free as well. We have to wait and see.