Google Adds Multilingual Document Search For Corporate Customers

| 05-01-2009 | Translation | Written by Matthew Bennett | 1 comment

Google has added automatic multilingual search for their corporate Google Search Appliance customers, and they’re calling it ‘Cross-Language Enterprise Search‘ (or a ‘Cross Language Search For Companies’ as Google’s own translation tool badly translated into Spanish).

Google Search Appliance

Before today, when users searched for a topic, the search only returned documents that were in the same language as the query. Cross-Language Enterprise Search instantly translates your Google Search Appliance query from one language to one or more other languages using Google’s best-in-class translation engine.

eWeek has interviewed Google Enterprise product manager Cyrus Mistry, who to my mind is a bit optimistic:

This is analogous to giving every employee in a business 34 translators sitting at their desk and translating everything they want to look for within a 10th of a second.

I think Google’s new tool will not be very useful for translating critical business documents but it will help to solve another business process problem: it will allow those companies who use it to increase their chances of knowing if relevant documents have been written in the other languages their company uses and where those documents are.

It will also help them to get a decent understanding of what a document is probably about. If it is non-critical information about routine, unimportant tasks, that will probably be enough.

If the documents are important marketing or legal communications, companies will still need to call a professional translator for the relevant language pairs and have him translate the documents properly.

This type of tool might even provide more work for professional translators as the companies who use Google’s Cross Language Search For Companies will now start to discover documents that they didn’t even know existed and a percentage of them will be important enough to require a professional translation.