Called a part of “spring cleaning”, one of the things Google has decided is to discontinue the Tanslate API, citing “substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse” as the reason.

As an alternative, Google is pointing to their Translate Element, part of their Web Elements for use on web pages.

Requests to the API will be throttled starting on May 26th, 2011 and finally killed totally in December 2011.

So how does this affect you?

Read on

For those not familiar, an API, put simply, is a way for developers to interface with a set of tools or functions.

In this case it allowed access to the Google Translate service.

While the Google Translate API is not the only available service, it had several things going in it’s favor: It was free and freely accessible and it was backed by Google, a “Do No Evil” company with a huge following of application developers.

By killing the API to the Translate service, Google has effectively killed or at least crippled huge numbers of desktop applications, mobile phone apps, games and services which make use of or depend upon translations.

Companies will be scambling to find alternatives as many used the API to communicate internationally and a web-based solution (Googles proffered alternative) is not workable in some cases.

Second Life developers are now in a quandry over how to proceed, as Google API translation is now built into almost every viewer and a large number of widely used translation devices.

Aside from the technical impact, this move has resulted in a backlash of ill-will and mistrust from many who are now wondering whether or not to continue to utilize ANY of the Google API’s for fear they will be killed off with little warning instead of Google’s stated period of 3 years to deprecate an API before removing it.

Many on the Google blog were in favor of some sort of payment or licensing model for API access but this seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

Other affected services are: Blog Search API, Books Data API and Books JavaScript API (not the new API), Image Search API, News Search API, Patent Search API, Safe Browsing API (v1 only), Transliterate API, Video Search API, Virtual Keyboard API

Guess this is sort of a short post, but not really much else one can say, in any language.