In May, Google deprecated their free translation API to the annoyance of many web developers. This past week, Google reinstated their translation API as a paid tool for businesses and web developers. The new and improved web translation API service provides a programmatic interface to access Google’s machine translation systems. The API offers service for more than 50 languages and is hosted in Google’s cloud infrastructure, which has a built-in, "large-scale" learning vehicle.
Some developers may not be as happy with a paid version replacing the previous free version, but the good news is that many usage restrictions of previous versions have been removed.
Translation costs $20 per million (M) characters of text translated (or approximately $0.05/page, assuming 500 words/page). You can sign up by way of the console for a unit volume of 50 M chars/month.
Web developers have until Dec. 1st 2011, to access a courtesy limit of 100K chars/day for building applications with the new translation API system.
Education institutions will continue to have free access to the service through the Google Translate Research API program.
