Israeli startup company Alfabetic (http://www.alfabetic.net) has developed an integrated statistical machine translation engine and publishing platform for blog publishers. All a blog publisher needs to do is submit an RSS feed of their blog to Alfabetic. Alfabetic will translate the blog and syndicate it using a worldwide network of regional aggregators and publishers. And the service is free. All costs will be offset by the revenue from the translated content. In fact, according to Alfabetic, blog publishers can expect to rake in big bucks by monetizing their content to readers worldwide. Watch Alfabetic CEO Oded Broshi
present the new system on http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=74#video.
Will it work? The idea is great and should be a no brainer for many blog publishers: a free service which may add revenue without needing to create new content. However, when two prominent blog publishers were asked if they would be interested in the service, they said "no," stating that mere translation of content can not be a substitute for a true local presence and that they would prefer to set up a dedicated blog domain in each target country (see these responses at the end of the video presentation).
And the quality of the system remains to be tested, since Alfabetic does not provide any demos or live results of their tool on their website. Alfabetic says that selected blogs will be post-edited by human translators after the content is machine translated. But normally, blogs will not be post edited. Will the quality of non-edited content be reasonable? No serious blog has yet to rely on machine translation as the quality has always proven to be insufficient.
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