By now, you have probably seen all sorts of chatter on Google’s new Translator Toolkit. Just as with anything Google does, it seems clean and useful. But what do professional translators think? That seems to be a mixed bag—and people appear to be adopting a “wait and see” attitude.

I was a little concerned in reading the help pages to see: “By default, we save your translations to a shared, publicly searchable [sic] translation memory.” The help goes on to describe how to avoid the default condition.

I just wonder, until we all decide that no one owns TMs (will we decide that? when?), this seems to be a bit risky. Translators will have to be on their toes to avoid sharing TMs that belong to their clients.