[MUSIC PLAYING]
LAURENCE MORONEY: Welcome to the Googleplex.
This is an incredible place with lots of great stuff being
worked on every single day.
Before I worked here, I always wondered
what it would be like to come to the Googleplex,
meet up with a Googler, and have coffee with them
and just chat about what they do, how they do it,
and why they do it.
And today we're going to do exactly that.
Welcome to this episode of "Coffee with a Googler".
Today, I'm speaking with MacDuff from the Google Translate team.
And we're going to be learning all
about some of the cool things that are
available in Google Translate.
And it's one of my favorite technologies,
because I'm a big "Star Trek" fan,
and it's one of the things that brings
like the universal communicator from "Star Trek"
much closer to reality.
So welcome.
[LAUGHING]
MACDUFF HUGHES: Thanks, Good to be here.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So welcome, MacDuff.
And tell us all about machine translation.
What's it all about?
MACDUFF HUGHES: Well, machine translation
is using computers to solve problems
of understanding and communication across languages.
It's based on this technology called statistical machine
translation, because most of how it works
is based on finding very large numbers of examples
of translations, mostly on the World Wide Web,
and using statistics to see how various words
and groups of words and phrases tend to be translated from one
language to another so that it can make reasonable guesses
about how to translate a sentence it's never
seen before.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I see.
So it's not a straight, like, look-up table of this word
is this, this word is this.
MACDUFF HUGHES: No.
No.
It has a lot of statistics about possible translations
and some pretty advanced algorithms to pick the best one
and how to combine them to make something natural sounding
in the resulting language.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
So sometimes a phrase might be translated
one way in one document and translated another way
in another document.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
For common phrases, we'll have many candidate translations
for a language.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now, what kind of volume do you get in this?
How big is Google Translate?
MACDUFF HUGHES: Well, we translate
about a billion characters a day,
about 100 million words or so for around 100 million,
upwards of that, users per day.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
OK.
So, now, there's a lot of languages
it must support to get that kind of volume.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Well, the volume doesn't really
come from a lot of languages.
A small number of languages account for most of the volume.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I see.
Got it.
MACDUFF HUGHES: But we do support a lot of languages.
We've worked very hard to make sure we support even languages
with relatively low usage.
So we've made a big push over the last few years
to get up to 90 languages supported.
LAURENCE MORONEY: 90, wow.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So what are the some of the less common
languages that are supported?
Do you have a favorite?
MACDUFF HUGHES: Do I have a favorite?
Well, my personal favorite is Welsh,
which I learned a little bit a few years ago.
LAURENCE MORONEY: [SPEAKING WELSH]
We're going to need translation for that underneath.
MACDUFF HUGHES: [SPEAKING WELSH] Yeah.
I started taking some courses a couple years ago, learned it.
So we do support that in Translate--
have for several years.
It doesn't get a tremendous amount of traffic,
but one thing you learn working on translation
is people are very proud of their languages.
It's a very important cultural thing
to see their language represented on the internet,
to have tools available to use it.
And especially for minority languages,
languages that are threatened, people
feel very strongly about them.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And Welsh is a great example.
I lived in Wales for three years.
And the pride that they take-- And it's
a beautiful language, too.
The pride they take in it.
So one of the things as well that you do
is like an OCR translation, so you can hold up a camera
and read text?
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
This is something we launched earlier this year,
was instant camera translation.
So you can just open Translate and open your camera,
and point it at text, and it translates it instantly
on the screen.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right So for Welsh,
for road signs in Cardiff?
MACDUFF HUGHES: We don't do Welsh yet.
We launched early this year with support for English
to and from six languages-- French, Spanish,
Italian, German, Russian, and Portuguese.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
MACDUFF HUGHES: But just the other day, we
launched support for downloadable packs
for an additional 20 languages.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, nice.
Nice.
Cool.
So I look forward to having a play with that.
Now, one of the things with machine translation
is that it's not always accurate.
MACDUFF HUGHES: It is not always accurate.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I'm sure there's
some funny things that can go wrong, lost in translation.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yeah.
There are a lot of funny things.
Latin produces a lot of hilarious examples,
because it's used in funny ways on the web,
not the way people normally talk.
People put Latin quotations around in strange places.
Or there is this thing called lorem ipsum text that printers
use to fill out webpages.
There was a conspiracy theory going around round
the internet earlier this year that there were coded
messages in our translations.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Hidden in lorem ipsum?
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
Yes.
There were.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Any web developers,
you probably have seen lorem ipsum
when you put a text block on your pages, that's
the text that they auto-populate so you can see layout.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
Yes.
Some of the more straightforward funny examples
are when you get the sense of a word wrong.
A lot of words in languages have many possible meanings.
But one favorite that we've seen is bed bugs.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
MACDUFF HUGHES: The word "bugs," in a number of languages,
it's gotten translated into the word for software bugs.
So bug, software defects.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So there's a software problem with my bed.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Or it can get a little edgy
with "Are you free today" if the word free
gets translated into the word meaning
no cost, no price, no money.
You gotta be careful who you say that to.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Absolutely.
You free?
No, no.
MACDUFF HUGHES: I'm free today, yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: There's one that I personally love.
And it was this girl on YouTube, and she will take songs--
MACDUFF HUGHES: Oh, I know where you're going.
Yeah.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right?
And she will translate the song into one language,
and then into another, and then into another, and then
into another, and come in a roundabout way
through about 20 languages back into English.
And then-- she's a great singer--
and she will sing the translation.
Have you seen it?
MACDUFF HUGHES: Those things are hilarious.
Yeah.
I think they really show how much is always
lost in translation.
It gets lost even faster with machine translation.
But it's very interesting, because so many things
are hard to express, especially song lyrics and poetry.
Even professional translators really
struggle to get those translated into an understandable way.
LAURENCE MORONEY: But what struck me
as remarkable was that even though it was wrong,
that you got the gist of it.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And it went through all these languages.
And I think there was one like "Bohemian Rhapsody."
And the opening line of "Bohemian Rhapsody"
came out as, like, "Mother, I shot a guy," or something
like that, after going through 20 different translations.
And it was really cool.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Well, that's what's amazing about it,
is even though we do make big mistakes in translation.
And a lot of times, you might translate a webpage or a news
story.
Maybe not one sentence is translated
absolutely perfectly.
But over the course of a long enough document,
you can get a sense of what it's about.
And the difference between seeing a wall of something
you don't understand at all and knowing
the general topic of an article can
be a big difference to people.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah.
And that's one of the things that the statistical base
translation helps you get right.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
MACDUFF HUGHES: That's the best thing for it,
is getting the gist of an of an article.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah.
Now, one thing I'd also noticed that you've been working on
recently is bringing people who are expert speakers
of the language into the fold.
So giving people the ability to feed back
into the statistical base translation that says,
you know what?
In my language we don't really say it like this.
We say it like this.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
So you're talking about Translate Community.
So that's something we introduced last year.
The great thing about that is you said expert.
But you don't really even have to be an expert.
Anyone who is reasonably competent in two languages
and wants to improve the translation
can go to Translate Community and help.
This was something that surprised us,
because people are just volunteering to help
make our product better.
But I mentioned earlier how passionate people
are about their languages, and especially minority
languages or things that are underrepresented in the world.
And for years, people were saying either,
Google, why don't you support my language?
Or, why aren't you better at supporting my language?
And for years, we had to say, well,
there's just not enough data out on the web for us to train
our models on.
But eventually we just tried asking people, hey,
will you come and help?
And there was a lot of enthusiasm,
especially from these minority language communities.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK, cool.
That's kind of exciting, though.
It's like getting people involved.
MACDUFF HUGHES: It really is exciting.
We're trying to make it more fun and engaging for people,
and let them use it as a way to connect with each other,
and to feel some satisfaction in what they're doing.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And it becomes less about just pure machine
translation, and people are getting
involved in the translation as well, which is really neat.
Keeping the language alive.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yeah.
So increasingly, for very common queries
and casual and conversational queries,
it becomes more and more likely that when
you ask for a translation, the translation
you see from Google Translate will
have been provided by members of the Translate Community, which
is very satisfying.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Yeah.
Very cool.
So now, one of the things, you've just recently
brought out a new app, right?
Or there was an update to the app?
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes, we did.
We just updated the mobile apps.
Like I mentioned, it adds 20 new languages
to the instant camera mode.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, cool.
MACDUFF HUGHES: And we've also made the speech
and conversation translation much faster than it
was in the previous release.
So the big feature from the previous release
was you could set up a conversation,
and two people could speak, and it would automatically
detect which language people are speaking in,
and switch back and forth.
So that's happening much faster now.
So you don't need as fast a network for it
to work responsively.
We also improved the accessibility
of the app for visually impaired users.
So this launched just the other day on Android and iOS space.
Very exciting.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I'll have to download and have a play.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Please do.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now, if I'm a developer,
and I want to start building translation into my apps,
or using translation in my apps, how do I get started?
MACDUFF HUGHES: We have a Google Translate API.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
MACDUFF HUGHES: It's on the cloud platform,
cloud.google.com And yes, we charge by the character
for the translation.
And we support all 90 languages.
And we have a big developer community developing
applications with that.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So if I'm a cloud developer using
the cloud.google.com console, the developers' console,
I'll see translator there as an option?
MACDUFF HUGHES: Yes.
Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK, cool.
So thank you so much, MacDuff.
That was really awesome.
And it's great to catch up and learn about some of the things
and find somebody else who speaks a few words of Welsh.
MACDUFF HUGHES: Great.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And thank you, everybody,
for watching this episode of "Coffee with a Googler."
I hope you learned as much as I did today.
It was, to me, really interesting
to learn about the great things that
are happening in Translate, and the great things that
are happening when the community gets involved.
And as MacDuff said, go on to the Cloud Developers' Console,
and you'll be able to get access to the APIs
if you want to build translation into your own apps.
Or you could download the new translation app
and play with some of the new languages that we spoke about.
So again, thanks, everybody.
And be sure to tune to the Google Developers'
Channel for more great videos.