At Google's world webcast Searchology Press conference, Udi Manber , VP Engineering, Google Inc announced the launch of Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) among other things.

In Manber's words, their aim is to take "all the Web and translate into multiple languages." Through this application, queries will be converted to different languages to garner more results which will further be translated back to the initial language. The aim of this service is for the user to gain all the results he/ she could use. Even if you do not speak or know certain languages, you can search and get results translated into the language of your choice.

A post at Tech Crunch mentions "dude, SMT (statistical machine translation) is so far away from reality via google that it’s not even funny - and even though they’ve got franz and another buncha super smart dudes working on it, this thing is *not* what those folks are working on….this is like putting google queries into a low end systran system and spitting back results - impressive if you’re query is about one word long, but beyond that not too useful….i’m totally confused about why they would bother launching in this way, seems antithetical to what they’re all about: making the world’s information more inaccessible in this case, via bad translation potential and wrongful query redirections… "

The translation service will debut in some months time.

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