I’m a strong admirer of Google business model but I keep wondering how did they managed to obtain such a huge number of typos inside their translation to Romanian language. I don’t have inside information about the aproaches they made in order to localize Google Groups but I have serious doubts about having any kind of quality check. Below you’ll find a screenshot of the “post new message window” from Google Groups, inside this page there are two serious typos on the most important parts. Any Romanian speaker will observe these in less than 10 seconds.
By looking at this we can draw some conclusions:
- Google didn’t use machine translation when localizing Google Groups
- The translators made a poor job – they used an non-existent verb for “post” (send a message)
- If they had any QE they did a really poor job
- They do not have a spell check test included in the localization process.
- There is no way of submitting errors inside the translations
I suppose now, nobody will disclose the name of the vendor working on this 
Few days ago Google silently launched Google Profiles and here I’ve encountered a classical “out of context” translation bug. They translated the phone type “home” as “home page” in Romanian instead of using “at home”. This kind of error is classical on machine translation but I’m afraid that their machine translator could do a better job. Sad, but I wasn’t able to translate the same page using their online translation engine.
The problem here, I think, comes down to the cost/effort tradeoff that Google have made when deciding how much money to invest in localisation testing.
With the project I am working on at the moment, I have found that it is impossible to ensure perfect quality translations in the translation phase itself, because the context is often either missing or unclear. That’s why we rely on the localisation testing phase to catch these kinds of errors.
But the problem is, when the product supports, say, 50 languages – how much money and time can you afford to invest to test it completely, in every single language?
Then add the fact that this is web software, for which an update might be released every month or two. Can you afford to perform that complete localisation testing for every single release?
Considering the number of Google users, they could come up with alternate solution for these kind of issues: like adding a report bad translation button.
Using this approach they could switch the testing to the end users. I’m sure that in less than a month they would have reports for 99% of their translation errors.
Let’s be fair… Google made at least a tiny effort that Yahoo and others never attempt to undertake it by now.