Google Translate is a free tool that enables you to translate sentences, documents and
even whole websites instantly.
But how exactly does it work? While it may seem like we have a room full of bilingual
elves working for us, in fact all of our translations come from computers. These computers use a
process called “statistical machine translation” -- which is just a fancy way to say that our computers
generate translations based on patterns found in large amounts of text.
But let’s take a step back. If you want to teach someone a new language you might
start by teaching them vocabulary words and grammatical rules that explain how to construct
sentences. A computer can learn a foreign language the same way - by referring to vocabulary
and a set of rules.
But languages are complicated and, as any language learner can tell you, there are exceptions
to almost any rule. When you try to capture all of these exceptions, and exceptions to
the exceptions, in a computer program, the translation quality begins to break down.
Google Translate takes a different approach. Instead of trying to teach our computers all
the rules of a language, we let our computers discover the rules for themselves. They do
this by analyzing millions and millions of documents that have already been translated
by human translators. These translated texts come from books, organizations like the UN
and websites from all around the world.
Our computers scan these texts looking for statistically significant patterns--that is
to say, patterns between the translation and the original text that are unlikely to occur
by chance. Once the computer finds a pattern, it can use this pattern to translate similar
texts in the future. When you repeat this process billions of times you end up with
billions of patterns and one very smart computer program.
For some languages however we have fewer translated documents available and therefore fewer patterns
that our software has detected. This is why our translation quality will vary by language
and language pair. We know our translations aren’t always perfect but by constantly
providing new translated texts we can make our computers smarter and our translations
better.
So next time you translate a sentence or webpage with Google Translate, think about those millions
of documents and billions of patterns that ultimately led to your translation - and all
of it happening in the blink of an eye.
Pretty cool, isn’t it?
Give it a try at translate.google.com.