{"id":1713,"date":"2011-05-28T22:19:33","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T02:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=1713"},"modified":"2011-08-25T04:03:35","modified_gmt":"2011-08-25T08:03:35","slug":"google-to-cancel-translate-api","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2011\/05\/28\/google-to-cancel-translate-api\/","title":{"rendered":"Google to cancel its translate API, citing ‘extensive abuse’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google’s APIs Product Manager Adam Feldman<\/strong> announced on Thursday<\/a> they will cancel the Google translate API<\/strong> by December, without replacing it, and that all use of it will be throttled until then.\u00a0 Any reusers or libraries relying on the translate API to programmatically provide a better multilingual experience will have to switch over to another translation service.\u00a0 (Some simple services will still be available to users, such as google.com\/translate<\/a>, but APIs will not be available to developers of other sites, libraries, or services.)<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> As of June 3, Google says that in response to the outcry, they plan to make a paid version of the translate API available<\/a>. No details yet on what that will look like.<\/div>\n

Ouch.\u00a0 This is a sudden shift, both from their strong earlier support for this API (I was personally encouraged to use it for applications by colleagues at Google), and from their standing policy of supporting deprecated services for up to 3 years.\u00a0\u00a0 What could have spooked them?\u00a0 Why the rush? As of today, the Translate API<\/a> page reads:<\/p>\n

The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011. Due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse, the number of requests you may make per day will be limited and the API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Most disappointing to me is the way this announcement was released: buried in a blog post full of minor “Spring Cleaning” updates to a dozen other APIs.\u00a0 Most of the other deprecated APIs were replaced by reasonable equivalents or alternatives, and were being maintained indefinitely with limits on the rate of requests per user.\u00a0 None of them is being cancelled within six months, and none of them are half as widely used!<\/p>\n

I hope that this obfuscation was an unintentional oversight.\u00a0 There have been 170 irate replies to that post so far, almost all about the Translate API cancellation.\u00a0 But it has been three days already without any significant update from Feldman or any mention of the change on the Google Translate blog<\/a>.\u00a0 Google’s response to a ZDNet inquiry was that they have no further information to provide on why they made this decision.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I am honestly unsure why they are doing this.\u00a0 Google used to have guaranteed relevance to many undiscovered future innovations in translation, thanks to their excellent API work and their monopoly on reuse today.\u00a0 They had a few years’ lead time on Microsoft (for instance), they could see how almost everyone in the world was using their translation tools.\u00a0 Now they are giving up that guarantee and goodwill, but for what?<\/p>\n

What was the extensive abuse?\u00a0 Spammers and copycats?\u00a0 What constitutes a substantial economic burden?\u00a0 I can think of no abuse that could not be effectively stopped by throttling or charging for the service.\u00a0 Many of the current users asked to be able to pay for their API access, but have received no response.<\/p>\n

The open question for groups like OLPC and Wikimedia, which had considered ways to use the Translate API to provide meaningful translation of interfaces and streams, is what toolchain to use instead.\u00a0\u00a0 And whether to invest in making one of the current (incomplete) free toolchains much, much better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google’s APIs Product Manager Adam Feldman announced on Thursday they will cancel the Google translate API by December, without replacing it, and that all use of it will be throttled until then.\u00a0 Any reusers or libraries relying on the translate API to programmatically provide a better multilingual experience will have to switch over to another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[210,211,218,212,709],"tags":[34512,34508,10010,6305,6005,497,2139,34506,3317,78845],"class_list":["post-1713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chain-gang","category-international","category-not-so-popular","category-null","category-wikipedia","tag-api-spring","tag-apis","tag-cancellation","tag-customer-service","tag-developers","tag-google","tag-olpc","tag-translate","tag-translation","tag-wikipedia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-rD","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1713"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1720,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions\/1720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}