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Google Translate

Google Translate is a free statistically-based machine translation service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, document or webpage, into another language.

The service was introduced in 2007. Prior to that Google used a SYSTRAN based translator which is used by other translation services such as Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo.

Features and limitations

The service limits the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, that will be translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language. For some languages, users are asked for alternate translations such as for technical terms, to be included for future updates to the translation process. Text in a foreign language can be typed, and if "Detect Language" is selected, it will not only detect the language but also translate it into English by default.

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations. Some languages produce better results than others. As of 2010, French to English translation is very good; however, rule-based machine translations perform better if the text to be translated is shorter; this effect is particularly evident in Chinese to English translations.

Texts written in the Greek, Devanagari, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts can be transliterated automatically from phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet.

Browser integration

A number of Firefox extensions exist for Google services, and likewise for Google Translate, which allow right-click command access to the translation service.

An extension for Google's Chrome browser also exists; in February 2010, Google translate was integrated into the standard Google Chrome browser for automatic webpage translation.

Language options

(by chronological order of introduction)

• 1st stage

English to French English to German English to Spanish

French to English German to English Spanish to English

• 2nd stage

English to Portuguese English to Dutch

Portuguese to English Dutch to English

• 3rd stage

English to Italian

Italian to English

• 4th stage

English to Chinese (Simplified) English to Japanese English to Korean

Chinese (Simplified) to English Japanese to English Korean to English

• 5th stage (launched December 2006)

English to Russian

Russian to English

• 6th stage (launched April 2007)

English to Arabic

Arabic to English

• 7th stage (launched February 2007)

English to Chinese (Traditional) Chinese (Simplified to Traditional)

Chinese (Traditional) to English Chinese (Traditional to Simplified)

• 8th stage (launched October 2007)
• all 25 language pairs use Google's machine translation system

• 9th stage

English to Hindi

Hindi to English

• 10th stage (as of this stage, translation can be done between any two languages, going through English, if needed) (launched May 2008)

Bulgarian Croatian Czech Danish

Finnish Greek Norwegian Polish

Romanian Swedish

• 11th stage (launched September 25, 2008)

Catalan Filipino Hebrew

Indonesian Latvian Lithuanian

Serbian Slovak Slovene

Ukrainian Vietnamese

• 12th stage (launched January 30, 2009)

Albanian Estonian Galician

Hungarian Maltese Thai

Turkish

• 13th stage (launched June 19, 2009)

Persian

• 14th stage (launched August 24, 2009)

Afrikaans Belarusian Icelandic

Irish Macedonian Malay

Swahili Welsh Yiddish

• 15th stage (launched November 19, 2009)
• The Beta stage is finished. Users can now choose to have the romanization written for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hindi and Thai. For translations from Arabic, Persian and Hindi, the user can enter a Latin transliteration of the text and the text will be translated to the native script for these languages as the user is writing. The text can now be read by a text-to-speech program in English, Italian, French and German
• 16th stage (launched January 30, 2010)
• Haitian Creole
• 17th stage (launched April 2010)
• Speech program launched in Hindi and Spanish
• 18th stage (launched May 5, 2010)
• Speech program launched in Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh (based in eSpeak).
• 19th stage (launched May 13, 2010)

Armenian Azerbaijani

Basque Georgian

Urdu

• 20th stage (launched June 2010)

Provides romanization for Arabic.

• 21st stage (launched September 2010)

Allows phonetic typing for Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Serbian and Urdu. Latin

Translation methodology

It does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis.

Google translate is based on an approach called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Franz-Josef Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003. Och is now the head of Google's machine translation department.

According to Och, a solid base for developing a usable statistical machine translation system for a new pair of languages from scratch, would consist in having a bilingual text corpus (or parallel collection) of more than a million words and two monolingual corpora of each more than a billion words. Statistical models from this data are then used to translate between those languages.

To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used United Nations documents.The same document is normally available in all six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish), so Google now has a 6-language corpus of 20 billion words' worth of human translations.

The availability of Arabic and Chinese as official UN languages is probably one of the reasons why Google Translate initially focused on the development of translation between English and those languages, and not, for example, Japanese and German, which are not official languages at the UN.

Google representatives have been very active at domestic conferences in Japan asking researchers to provide them with bilingual corpora.

Translation mistakes and oddities

Because Google Translate uses statistical matching to translate rather than a dictionary/grammar rules approach, translated text can often include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors, often swapping common terms for similar but nonequivalent common terms in the other language, as well as inverting sentence meaning.