With machine translation, Google is bringing to bear its formidable Web index—which at last count included 6 billion documents, images and items—as well as its computing resources. Google is well-known for having one of the largest clusters of Linux-based servers, which number in the thousands.

Google already provides a Web-page translation feature, but Norvig said it is based on technology from a third party. Its research project is based on homegrown technology that eventually could translate Web pages and links more automatically, he said.

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…a classified report that says since Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI has failed to translate hundreds of thousands of hours of wiretap and audio recordings from terrorism and espionage work.

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