[Quoting David Grunwald From the GTS Blog] "While reading Google’s website today on this page, I was amazed to read that Google plans to start charging for using its Translator Toolkit. Google states: “Google Translator Toolkit is free, but in the future, we plan to charge users whose translations exceed high-volume thresholds.” This is really am amazing piece of news, since Google gives away all of its services for free. Is this a trend which Google will follow with other services? And why start charging for translation? If anyone has an answer to this I would appreciate hearing it. In a discussion I initiated on Linkedin’s Automated Language Translation Group back in July 2009, I raised the status of Google’s MT initiative, where they were headed with it and what it means to the commercial MT (machine translation) vendors. Specifically, why should people pay for translation services when Google offers them for free? I guess that this announcement puts Google in the category of commercial MT vendors after all. This announcement should come as good news to the vendors whose main business is MT, as they should be able to compete with a giant company that “also sells MT.” The announcement should be treated with caution by customers: what looks great today may not be that great tomorrow. I would like to congratulate Jaap van der Meer of TAUS who predicted that Google will start charging for MT. Jaap, you are true visionary – chapeau." Full story and comments: http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=80906470&gid=148593&srchCat=WOTC&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fblog%2Egts-translation%2Ecom%2F2009%2F10%2F28%2Fgoogle-to-start-charging-for-translations%2F&urlhash=DBms
Next time you think languages, think Pangeanic