In a bid to further deliver on the promise of making information universally accessible to everyone, Google (News - Alert) announced back in June the “Google Translator Toolkit,” an offering that goes a step further than their Google Translate, an automatic translation system, by adding necessary “human touch” to machine translation.

 

Basically, human translators are able to easily edit, correct and add content translated automatically by machine.

 

Human translators can upload Word docs, HTML, text and other documents for full translation as well as use a WYSIWIG for pre-translation improvement and even publish Wikipedia and knol translations back to Wikipedia or Knol.

According to an article today in the New York Times, this tool also has the ability to save ancient languages that are otherwise threatened by extinction - while also giving Google more power to become a major machine translation service.

The NYT article highlights one New Zealand university lecturer who is using Google’s Translator Toolkit to add translations of English texts in his ancient Maroi language.

As more users access and use the texts in this language, it will help keep the language of his ancestors from going extinct.

Reportedly, this news, and as other users constantly add new language translations to the toolkit, Google, will, according to the NYT report, be able to “beef up its machine translation system” and increase the lineup of languages it can automatically translate -beyond what any other machine translation systems offer.