![]() As most online information is in English, it is more likely that Google Translate will be used by non-English speakers to translate English documents into other languages. Nonetheless, despite the promising ability to mediate and understand different views, it seems unlikely that most English-speaking users will suddenly start comparing resources and views as this requires extra time and skills. This suggests that the political significance of online translation tools to diffuse Western views has been recognised. An interesting government response in this context was the blocking of Google Translate by the regime in Sudan in order to limit the ability of Arabic speakers to read English news online ( Mathaba, 2006). Google Toolbar makes this service even more accessible as it enables the translation of webpages at the click of a button and therefore, on the surface, addresses the language divide, particularly by enabling non- English speakers to read online information in English. It also has further implications for the problem of the digital divide. While this service is not directly related to information search, it definitely follows the line of Google’s ambition to make the world’s information available for all. ![]() Using this innovative approach, Google has achieved impressive results in translating online texts from Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. ![]() First the system finds patterns within the human-translated bilingual text, and then it builds rules to translate any given text ( Google, 2006a). Unlike online services that use a dictionary translation, 12 Google also uses statistical machine translation, which generates translation by using statistical methods based on bilingual text corpora, such as United Nations documents, or the English- French record of the Canadian Parliament. using search queries and getting search results in one language from websites written in other languages. ![]() In addition, it enables searching across languages, i.e. While information inequalities emerge as a result of the language divide, Google Translate enables translating text and entire webpages in more than 40 languages. Google and the politics of online searchingĮlad Segev, in Google and the Digital Divide, 2010 Google Translate ![]()
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