Google Translate: Flawless and Secure, says Google

Despite some recent concerns over a potential security flaw, it turns out that the Google Translate apps on the computer, and for iOS and Android devices, is not as vulnerable as one report said it was.

IceWarp, a multi-lingual unified communications platform based in Springfield, Va., said it had found a number of vulnerabilities in the second API version of Google Translate, which could let anyone with basic hacking skills to easily hijack the solution and expose unsuspecting users to unwated fees.

Ladislav Goc, the president of IceWarp, said he discovered the flaw while integrating Google Translate to power LiveWebAssist, the company's business chat service.

We were really surprised to find out that virtually anyone with basic hacking skills can steal a customer code, Goc said. It is relatively easy, since Google Translate is typically using JavaScript. The code is visible to everybody directly in the HTML code of the page.

Goc managed to resolve the issue by tasking the company to create its own PHP objects, which would only use Google Translate from the server side, thus keeping the local computers safe.

Google Translate is an outstanding product, and we are proud to be in the first batch of its paying customers, Goc said.

A spokesperson from Google responded to IceWarp's allegations, and said the company was experiencing a configuration problem and not a security issue.

Our documentation for the APIs Console specifies that developers can restrict their API key to referrers they specifically allow, the Google spokesperson said. As a best practice for security, we recommend that developers proxy the API requests through their own server to keep their key private.

The spokesperson added that many developers use the API on the server side to begin with.

Google opened up its Google Translate API in August, charging developers for $20 per one million characters of translated text, which amounts to roughly five cents a page. The courtesy use of the Google Translate API v2 ended on Dec. 1.

Google updated its Google Translate Android application in October, adding 14 more languages to the app's Conversation Mode, which is an alpha feature that allows the user to have full conversations with another person using the app's speech-to-speech service. Both the Android and iOS versions of Google Translate include a similar feature where users can listen to their translations spoken aloud in 24 different languages.

Google Translate can currently translate text between 63 languages, which can be typed or spoken into the device. Google Translate can translate between Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh and Yiddish. The platform also accommodates those who want to type out special characters, including non-Latin script languages like Chinese and Japanese, and also Latin characters like Romaji and Pinyin.

Google Translate is a free download from the App Store and Android Market, and is accessible on the computer via translate.google.com.