Yahoo! Japan Translate

» see honyaku.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Yahoo! Japan Translate opened on 31 January 2005 and did what every translation service of that decade did. There was a text box you pasted into and a second box that filled with output. There was a URL field that would fetch a whole page and give it back to you translated in place, links and layout intact. Nine languages went through it: Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian.

The engine was not Yahoo's. It was licensed from Cross Language, a Tokyo company that had been selling rule-based translation software since the 1990s, and Yahoo wrapped a free public interface around it and hooked it into search so that foreign-language results could be read without leaving the page. That was the whole product, and it was enough to keep it running for twelve years.

On 14 April 2017 Yahoo posted that the service would end on 29 June. The reason given was that the options for translation had widened and the service had finished its role, which people in Japan read as a company declining to invent a better excuse. On 30 June the address served a notice and a list of other translators to try.

~ the case file ~

~ decoding, not reading ~

Statistical and rule-based translation in 2005 produced output you had to negotiate with. Reading it meant decoding it, using the shape of the mangled sentence plus whatever you already knew about the subject. Everyone who used the web across a language barrier in that era developed the same habit.

My version of this was Babel Fish and then Google Translate on English and Turkish, which is a language pair that rule-based systems handled badly enough to be funny. Japanese to English was worse, because word order and dropped subjects break the rules these systems ran on. Yahoo! Japan's output was not accurate either. It turned a page you could not open into a page you could guess at.

~ the role was complete ~

The stated reason is the interesting part of this grave. Companies almost always say a service is being discontinued to focus on other priorities. Yahoo said the point of the product had been to widen the base of people who used machine translation, that this had happened, and that other services now did it. Google Translate switched to neural machine translation for Japanese in November 2016, seven months before the shutdown, and the jump in quality that year was the largest in the field's history.

So a free service closed because the thing it existed to popularize had been popularized, by somebody else, better. There is no scandal in the file and no acquisition. Twelve years, then a notice with a date on it.

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