To be honest, I’ve never been that much of a fan of the use of translation HUDs in Second Life, or the use of the built-in chat-translation feature – both of which use Google Translate. Mechanical translation systems tend to produce some awfully wild – and frequently unintentionally hilarious – results when it comes to conversational or instructional uses of language.

Nevertheless, these options – or at least the ones using the Google Translate API – are going away and have now been rate-limited. Google feels its translation API service has been suffering from abuse.

Google has published this notice:

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. For website translations, we encourage you to use the Google Translate Element.

I cannot help but wonder how much of that financial burden is from Second Life users with translation HUDs, or with the built-in translation feature enabled. I imagine that usage could run to a substantial amount.

Update (3 June 2011): Google will be transitioning the API to a paid-service rather than closing it entirely. At this time, no pricing has been announced.

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Tags: Google, Google Translate API, Google Translate Element, Language, Language Translation, Second Life, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds