Google wins at machine translation

Here's another Google feature that's winning plaudits: The company's automatic translation service was tested by the National Institute of Science and Technology, and beat out competing products from major research labs. The test focused solely on translations of Arabic and Chinese text, and Google scored 0.51  out of a possible 1.0 on the Arabic tests and 0.35 on the Chinese tests. Those scores give Google plenty of room for improvement, but still put it well ahead of competitors.