Google Translate is a free, multilingual statistical machine-translation service provided by Google
Inc. to translate written text from one language into another.
Before October 2007, for languages other than Arabic, Chinese and Russian, Google Translate
was based on SYSTRAN, a software engine which is still used by several other online translation
services such as Yahoo! Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo.
Since October 2007, Google Translate has used proprietary, in-house technology based on
statistical machine translation instead.
On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the Google Translate API for software developers
had been deprecated and would cease functioning on December 1, 2011, "due to the substantial
economic burden caused by extensive abuse."
Because the API was used in numerous third-party websites, this decision led some developers
to criticize Google and question the viability of using Google APIs in their products.
In response to public pressure, Google announced on June 3, 2011, that the API would continue
to be available as a paid service.
Features
Google Translate offers a web interface, mobile interfaces for Android and iOS, and an API
that developers can use to build browser extensions, applications, and other software.
For some languages, Google Translate can pronounce translated text, highlight corresponding words
and phrases in the source and target text, and act as a simple dictionary for single-word
input.
If "Detect language" is selected, text in an unknown language can be identified.
In the web interface, users can suggest alternate translations, such as for technical terms,
or correct mistakes.
These suggestions are included in future updates to the translation process.
If a user enters a URL in the source text, Google Translate will produce a hyperlink
to a machine translation of the website.
For some languages, text can be entered via an on-screen keyboard, handwriting recognition,
or speech recognition.
Browser integration Google Translate is available in some browsers
as an extension which can translate websites.
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.
Android version Google Translate is available as a free downloadable
application for Android OS users.
The first version was launched in January 2010.
It works simply like the browser version.
Google translation for Android contains two main options: "SMS translation" and "History".
An early 2011 version supported Conversation Mode when translating between English and
Spanish.
This interface within Google Translate allows users to communicate fluidly with a nearby
person in another language.
In October 2011 it was expanded to 14 languages.
The application supports 53 languages and voice input for 15 languages.
It is available for devices running Android 2.1 and above and can be downloaded by searching
for “Google Translate” in Google Play.
It was first released in January 2010, with an improved version available on January 12,
2011.
Latest version: 2.0.0 build 42.
iOS version In August 2008, Google launched a Google Translate
HTML5 web application for iOS for iPhone and iPod Touch users.
The official iOS app for Google Translate was released February 8, 2011.
It accepts voice input for 15 languages and allows translation of a word or phrase into
one of more than 50 languages.
Translations can be spoken out loud in 23 different languages.
Limitations Google Translate, like other automatic translation
tools, has its limitations.
The service limits the number of paragraphs and the range of technical terms that can
be translated, and 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.
Google Translate performs well especially when English is the target language and the
source language is one of the languages of the European Union.
A 2010 analysis indicated that French to English translation is relatively accurate, and 2011
and 2012 analyses showed that Italian to English translation is relatively accurate as well.
However, if the source text is shorter, rule-based machine translations often perform better;
this effect is particularly evident in Chinese to English translations.
While edits of translations may be submitted, in Chinese specifically one is not able to
edit sentences as a whole.
Instead, one must edit sometimes arbitrary sets of characters, leading to incorrect edits.
Texts written in the Greek, Devanagari, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts can be transliterated automatically
from phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet.
The browser version of the Google translator provides the read phonetically option for
Japanese to English conversion.
The same option is not available on the paid API version.
Many of the more popular languages have a "text-to-speech" audio function that is able
to read back a text in that language, up to a few dozen words or so.
In the case of pluricentric languages, the accent depends on the region: for English,
in the Americas, most of the Asia-Pacific and West Asia the audio uses a female General
American accent, whereas in Europe, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Guyana and all other
parts of the world a female British English accent is used, except for a special Oceania
accent used in Australia, New Zealand and Norfolk lsland; for Spanish, in the Americas
a Latin American Spanish accent is used, while in the other parts of the world a Castilian
Spanish accent is used; Portuguese uses a São Paulo accent in the world, except for
Portugal, where their native accent is used.
For other less popular languages, the audio is a garbled monotonous vaguely male low-quality
voice.
Supported languages 1st stage
2nd stage 3rd stage
4th stage 5th stage
6th stage 7th stage
8th stage all 25 language pairs use Google's machine
translation system
9th stage 10th stage
11th stage 12th stage
13th stage 14th stage
15th stage 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 transliterated to the native script for these languages as
the user is typing.
The text can now be read by a text-to-speech program in English, Italian, French and German
16th stage Haitian Creole
17th stage Speech program launched in Hindi and Spanish
18th stage Speech program launched in Afrikaans, Albanian,
Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic,
Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian,
Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.
19th stage 20th stage
21st stage 22nd stage
Romanization of Arabic removed.
Spell check added.
Google replaced some languages' text-to-speech synthesizers from eSpeak's robot voice to
native speaker's nature voice technologies made by SVOX.
Also the old versions of French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Latin uses the same synthesizer as Italian.
Speech program launched in Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.
23rd stage Choice of different translations for a word.
24th stage 5 new Indic languages and a transliterated
input method:Bengali Gujarati
Kannada Tamil
Telugu
25th stage Translation rating introduced.
26th stage Dutch male voice synthesizer replaced with
female.
Elena by SVOX replaced the Slovak eSpeak voice.
Transliteration of Yiddish added.
27th stage Speech program launched in Thai.
Esperanto added.
28th stage Lao added.
29th stage Transliteration of Lao added.
(Alpha status.)
30th stage New speech program launched in English
31st stage New speech program in French, Spanish, Italian,
and German
32nd stage Phrasebook added.
33rd stage Khmer added.
34th stage Bosnian
Cebuano Hmong
Javanese Marathi
35th stage 16 additional languages can be used with camera-input:
Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic,
Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish.
36th stage Hausa
Igbo Maori
Mongolian Nepali
Punjabi Somali
Yoruba Zulu
37th stage Definition of words added.
Translation methodology Google Translate does not apply grammatical
rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based
analysis.
Indeed, the system's original creator, Franz Josef Och, has criticized the effectiveness
of rule-based algorithms in favor of statistical approaches.
It is based on a method called statistical machine translation, and more specifically,
on research by Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003.
He is now the head of Google's machine translation group.
Google does not translate from one language to another, but often translates first to
English and then to the target language.
However, because English, like all human languages, is ambiguous and depends on context, this
can cause translation errors.
For example, translating vous from French to Russian gives vous → you → ты OR
Bы/вы.
If Google were using an unambiguous, artificial language as the intermediary, it would be
vous → you → Bы/вы OR tu → thou → ты.
Such a suffixing of words disambiguates their different meanings.
Hence, publishing in English, using unambiguous words, providing context, using expressions
such as "you all" often make a better one-step translation.
The following languages do not have a direct Google translation to or from English.
These languages are translated through the indicated intermediate language in addition
to through English: Belarusian;
Catalan; Galician;
Haitian Creole; Slovak;
Ukrainian; Urdu.
Overlooking the grammar of the language can cause mistakes.
For example, consider the following sentence:Пишет вам) письмо семья Дарьи.
Based on the word order, Google translates: You wrote a letter to family Darya.
Based on declensions, it means: [it's] Daria's family [that] writes you a letter, exactly
the opposite.
Google took you for to you, Daria for of Daria as well as to the family for the family.
When translating back to Russian, however, Google says: Семья Дарьи пишет
вам письмо.
That's correct because Google understood the English word order.
Respecting the same word order as in English or publishing in English as above may help.
According to Och, a solid base for developing a usable statistical machine translation system
for a new pair of languages from scratch would consist of a bilingual text corpus of more
than a million words, and two monolingual corpora each of more than a billion words.
Statistical models from these data are then used to translate between those languages.
To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used United Nations documents.
The UN typically publishes documents in all six official UN languages, which has produced
a very large 6-language corpus.
Google representatives have been involved with domestic conferences in Japan where Google
has solicited bilingual data from researchers.
When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions
of documents to help decide on the best translation.
By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators,
Google Translate makes intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should
be.
Open Source Licenses and Components
Reviews Shortly after launching the translation service,
Google won an international competition for English–Arabic and English–Chinese machine
translation.
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.
Also, for the speech, it uses only European French as well as Latin American Spanish worldwide,
but both European and Brazilian Portuguese.
Controversies Google has been accused of sexism due to the
statistical assignment of gender when translating from or through English into languages where
verbs are conjugated by gender.
For example, the phrase I drive used to be translated into a masculine conjugation, while
I cook into a feminine conjugation, due to the higher occurrence of such forms in corpora.
Due to public criticism in Israel, Google has manually fixed some apparent cases of
sexist translation into Hebrew by using the masculine form for all verbs.
See also Asia Online
Babel Fish Bing Translator
Comparison of machine translation applications Google Dictionary
Jollo List of Google services and tools
Systran References
External links Official website
Google Language Tools Google Translate blog
Inside Google Translate on Google's official channel at YouTube
Statistical machine translation live, Franz Josef Och, Google Research blog, April 28,
2006 Double Translation