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Google Translate
File:Google TranslateIcon.png
Screenshot
Google Translate homepage
Type of site
Statistical machine translation
Available in103 languages, see supported languages
OwnerGoogle
URLtranslate.google.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional
UsersOver 200+ million people.[1]
LaunchedApril 28, 2006; 18 years ago (2006-04-28) (as rule-based machine translation)[2]
October 22, 2007; 17 years ago (2007-10-22) (as statistical machine translation)[3]
Current statusActive

Google Translate is a free multilingual statistical machine translation service provided by Google to translate text, speech, images, or real-time video from one language into another. It 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.[4] As of November 2024, Google Translate supports 103 languages at various levels[4] and serves over 200 million people daily.[1]

Features

English Wikipedia's homepage translated into Portuguese

Web interface

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.[5]

In the web interface, users can suggest alternate translations, such as for technical terms, or correct mistakes. These suggestions may be 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.[5] It is possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing one to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language.

Browser integration

Google Translate is available in some browsers as an extension which can run the translation engine.

A number of Firefox extensions exist for Google services, and likewise for Google Translate, which allow right-click command access to the translation service.[6]

An extension for Google's Chrome browser also exists;[7] in February 2010, Google Translate was integrated into the standard Google Chrome browser for automatic webpage translation.[8][9]

Mobile interface

The application supports 90 languages and can translate 37 languages via photo, 32 via voice in conversation mode, and 27 via real-time video in augmented reality mode.[10]

An early 2011 version supported Conversation Mode when translating between English and Spanish (in alpha testing). 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.[11]

The 'Camera input' functionality allows users to take a photograph of a document, signboard, etc. Google Translate recognises the text from the image using optical character recognition (OCR) technology and gives the translation. Camera input is not available for all languages.

In January 2015, the application gained the ability to translate text in real time using the device's camera, as a result of Google's acquisition of the Word Lens app.[12] The speed and quality of real-time video translation (augmented reality) feature were further enhanced in July 2015 with the release of a new implementation that utilizes convolutional neural networks.[13][14]

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 Translate for Android contains two main options: "SMS translation" and "History".

The application supports 90 languages and voice input for 15 languages.[15] 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.[16]

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, and the iOS app was released on February 8, 2011. The current Google Translate app is compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch updated to iOS 7.0+.[17] 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.[18]

Latest version: 4.0.0 (July 29, 2015)[17]

API

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."[19][20] 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.[21][22] In response to public pressure, Google announced on June 3, 2011, that the API would continue to be available as a paid service.[19][23]

Supported languages

History
  • 1st stage
  • 2nd stage
  • 3rd stage
  • 4th stage
  • 5th stage (launched April 28, 2006)[24]
  • 6th stage (launched December 16, 2006)
  • 7th stage (launched February 9, 2007)
  • 8th stage (all 25 language pairs use Google's machine translation system) (launched October 22, 2007)
    • English to and from Dutch
    • English to and from Greek
  • 9th stage
    • English to and from Hindi
  • 10th stage (as of this stage, translation can be done between any two languages, using English as an intermediate step, if needed) (launched May 8, 2008)
  • 11th stage (launched September 25, 2008)
  • 12th stage (launched January 30, 2009)
  • 13th stage (launched June 19, 2009)
  • 14th stage (launched August 24, 2009)
  • 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 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 (launched January 30, 2010)
  • 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 on eSpeak)[25]
  • 19th stage (launched May 13, 2010)[26]
  • 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[27]
  • 22nd stage (launched December 2010)
    • Romanization of Arabic removed.
    • Spell check added.
    • For some languages, Google replaced text-to-speech synthesizers from eSpeak's robot voice to native speaker's nature voice technologies made by SVOX[28] (Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Turkish). 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 (launched January 2011)
    • Choice of different translations for a word.
  • 24th stage (launched June 2011)
  • 25th stage (launched July 2011)
    • Translation rating introduced.
  • 26th stage (launched January 2012)
    • Dutch male voice synthesizer replaced with female.
    • Elena by SVOX replaced the Slovak eSpeak voice.
    • Transliteration of Yiddish added.
  • 27th stage (launched February 2012)
  • 28th stage (launched September 2012)
  • 29th stage (launched October 2012)
    • Transliteration of Lao added. (alpha status)[31][32]
  • 30th stage (launched October 2012)
    • New speech program launched in English.
  • 31st stage (launched November 2012)
    • New speech program in French, Spanish, Italian and German.
  • 32nd stage (launched March 2013)
    • Phrasebook added.
  • 33rd stage (launched April 2013)
  • 34th stage (launched May 2013)
  • 35th stage (launched May 2013)
    • 16 additional languages can be used with camera-input: Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish.
  • 36th stage (launched December 2013)
  • 37th stage (launched June 2014)
    • Definition of words added.
  • 38th stage (launched December 2014)
  • 39th stage (launched October 2015)
    • Transliteration of Arabic restored.
  • 40th stage (launched November 2015)
  • 41st stage (launched February 2016)

Languages in development

These languages are not yet supported by Google Translate, but are available in the Translate Community.[41]

Translation methodology

Google Translate does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis. The system's original creator, Franz Josef Och, has criticized the effectiveness of rule-based algorithms in favor of statistical approaches.[42] 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. Och was the head of Google's machine translation group until leaving to join Human Longevity, Inc. in July 2014.[43]

Google Translate does not translate from one language to another (L1 → L2). Instead, it often translates first to English and then to the target language (L1 → EN → L2).[44][45][46] 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.[47] 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 (which in most cases is closely related to the desired language but more widely spoken) in addition to through English:[citation needed]

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 (or parallel collection) of more than 150-200 million words, and two monolingual corpora each of more than a billion words.[42] 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.[48] 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.[49]

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 (AI) as to what an appropriate translation should be.[4]

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 (now defunct). Since October 2007, Google Translate has used proprietary, in-house technology based on statistical machine translation instead.[50][51]

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 understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations, and most times it tends to repeat verbatim the same word it's expected to translate. Grammatically, for example, Google Translate struggles to differentiate between imperfect and perfect tenses in Romance languages so habitual and continuous acts in the past often become single historical events. Although seemingly pedantic, this can often lead incorrect results (to a native speaker of for example French and Spanish) which would have been avoided by a human translator. Knowledge of the subjunctive mood is virtually non-existent.[52] Moreover, the informal second person (tu) is often chosen, whatever the context or accepted usage.[53] Since its English reference material contains only "you" forms, it is difficult to translate into a language which has more.

Some languages produce better results than others. Google Translate performs well especially when English is the target language and the source language is from the European Union due to the prominence of translated EU parliament notes. A 2010 analysis indicated that French to English translation is relatively accurate,[54] and 2011 and 2012 analyses showed that Italian to English translation is relatively accurate as well.[55][56] 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.[54]

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 Google Translate provides the read phonetically option for Japanese to English conversion. The same option is not available on the paid API version.

Accent of English that the "text-to-speech" audio of Google Translate of each country uses
  British English (female)
  American English (female)
  Oceania accent (female)
  No Google translate service

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 Island; 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. Some less widely spoken languages use the open-source eSpeak synthesizer for their speech; producing a robotic, awkward voice that may be difficult to understand.

Keyboard shortcuts

The Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Translate extension for Google Chrome lets you use the following keyboard shortcuts for Google Translate: [57]

  • alt / ⌥ Option + A → select all
  • alt / ⌥ Option + D → delete
  • alt / ⌥ Option + L → listen to target translation
  • alt / ⌥ Option + ⇧ Shift + L → listen to source translation

Open-source licenses and components

Language WordNet[4] Licence
Albanian Albanet CC-BY 3.0/GPL 3
Arabic Arabic Wordnet CC-BY-SA 3
Catalan Multilingual Central Repository CC-BY-3.0
Chinese Chinese Wordnet Wordnet
Danish Dannet Wordnet
English Princeton Wordnet Wordnet
Finnish FinnWordnet Wordnet
French WOLF (WOrdnet Libre du Français) CeCILL-C
Galician Multilingual Central Repository CC-BY-3.0
Hebrew Hebrew Wordnet Wordnet
Hindi IIT Bombay Wordnet Indo Wordnet
Indonesian Wordnet Bahasa MIT
Italian MultiWordnet CC-BY-3.0
Japanese Japanese Wordnet Wordnet
Javanese Javanese Wordnet Wordnet
Malay Wordnet Bahasa MIT
Norwegian Norwegian Wordnet Wordnet
Persian Persian Wordnet Free to Use
Polish plWordnet Wordnet
Portuguese OpenWN-PT CC-BY-SA-3.0
Spanish Multilingual Central Repository CC-BY-3.0
Thai Thai Wordnet Wordnet

Reviews

Shortly after launching the translation service, Google won an international competition for English–Arabic and English–Chinese machine translation.[58]

Translation mistakes and oddities

Since Google Translate uses statistical matching to translate, translated text can often include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors,[59] often swapping common terms for similar but nonequivalent common terms in the other language,[60] as well as inverting sentence meaning.[61]

Translate Community

Translate Community is a platform that is intended to improve Google Translate service. Volunteers can select up to five languages to help in better translation. Users can verify translated phrases and translate phrases in their languages to and from English, helping to improve the accuracy of translating more rare and complex phrases.[62]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Shankland, Stephen. "Google Translate now serves 200 million people daily". CNET. Retrieved October 17, 2014.
  2. ^ "Research Blog: Statistical machine translation live". Google Research Blogspot. April 28, 2006. Retrieved March 11, 2016.
  3. ^ "Google Switches to Its Own Translation System". Google System Blogspot. October 22, 2007. Retrieved March 11, 2016.
  4. ^ a b c d "Inside Google Translate". Google Translate.
  5. ^ a b "Google Translate Help". Google. Retrieved June 4, 2014.
  6. ^ "Search Add-ons :: Add-ons for Firefox". Mozilla. Retrieved August 7, 2009.
  7. ^ Google Translate by chrome.translate.extension chrome.google.com
  8. ^ "Google Translate Integrated in Google Chrome 5". Ghacks.net. February 14, 2010. Retrieved December 22, 2011.
  9. ^ Google Chrome 5 features an integrated Google Translate service February 15, 2010. stuff.techwhack.com
  10. ^ Ariha Setalvad (July 29, 2015). "Google Translate adds 20 new languages to video text translation". The Verge.
  11. ^ Ryan Kim (October 13, 2011). "Google Translate conversation mode expands to 14 languages". GigaOM.
  12. ^ "Hallo, hola, olá to the new, more powerful Google Translate app". Google Blog.
  13. ^ Barak Turovsky (July 29, 2015). "See the world in your language with Google Translate". Google Official Blog.
  14. ^ Otavio Good (July 29, 2015). "How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone". Google Research Blog.
  15. ^ "About Google Translate". Retrieved July 13, 2015.
  16. ^ A new look for Google Translate for Android, Awaneesh Verma, Google Translate Blog, January 12, 2011
  17. ^ a b "Google Translate on iTunes". Google. Retrieved July 29, 2015.
  18. ^ Introducing the Google Translate app for iPhone, Wenzhang Zhu, Google Translate Blog, February 8, 2011
  19. ^ a b Feldman, Adam (May 26, 2011). "Spring cleaning for some of our APIs". Google Code. Retrieved May 28, 2011.
  20. ^ "Google Translate API (Deprecated)". Google Code. Archived from the original on May 28, 2011. Retrieved May 28, 2011.
  21. ^ Wong, George (May 27, 2011). "Google gets rid of APIs for Translate and other services". UberGizmo. Retrieved May 28, 2011.
  22. ^ Burnette, Ed (May 27, 2011). "Google pulls the rug out from under web service API developers, nixes Google Translate and 17 others". ZDNet. Retrieved May 28, 2011.
  23. ^ "Google cancels plan to shutdown Translate API. To start charging for translations". June 4, 2011. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
  24. ^ Statistical machine translation live, Franz Josef Och, Google Research Blog, April 28, 2006
  25. ^ Henderson, Fergus (November 5, 2010). "Giving a voice to more languages on Google Translate". Google Blog. Retrieved December 22, 2011.
  26. ^ "Five more languages on Google Translate". Google Translate Blog. May 13, 2010. Retrieved December 22, 2011.
  27. ^ Jakob Uszkoreit, Ingeniarius Programmandi (September 30, 2010). "Veni, Vidi, Verba Verti". Google Blog. Retrieved December 22, 2011.
  28. ^ SVOX Archived 2010-12-26 at the Wayback Machine
  29. ^ "Google Translate welcomes you to the Indic web". Google Translate Blog.
  30. ^ Google Translate Blog: Tutmonda helplingvo por ĉiuj homoj
  31. ^ Brants, Thorsten (September 13, 2012). "Translating Lao". Google Translate Blog. Retrieved September 19, 2012.
  32. ^ Crum, Chris (September 13, 2012). "Google Adds its 65th Language to Google Translate with Lao". WebProNews. Retrieved September 19, 2012.
  33. ^ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3453035/Aloha-Google-adds-13-new-languages-Translate-tool-including-Scots-Gaelic-Hawaiian-taking-total-103.html
  34. ^ http://www.dnaindia.com//scitech/report-google-adds-sindhi-to-its-translate-language-options-2179229
  35. ^ https://in.news.yahoo.com/google-adds-sindhi-translate-language-options-113113260.html
  36. ^ http://www.brecorder.com/arts-a-leisure/lifestyle/279458-google-translate-now-includes-sindhi-and-pashto.html
  37. ^ http://www.dawn.com/news/1240589
  38. ^ http://www.dailysarwan.com/editorial/%DA%AF%D9%88%DA%AF%D9%84-%D8%AA%D9%8A-%D8%B3%D9%86%DA%8C%D9%8A-%D9%BB%D9%88%D9%84%D9%8A/
  39. ^ http://awamiawaz.com/%D8%B3%D9%86%DA%8C%D9%8A-104-%D9%BB%D9%88%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%86-%DB%BE-%D8%AA%D8%B1%D8%AC%D9%85%D9%88-%D9%BF%D9%8A%D9%86%D8%AF%DA%99-%D9%BB%D9%88%D9%84%D9%8A-%D8%A8%DA%BB%D8%AC%D9%8A-%D9%88%D9%8A%D8%A6/
  40. ^ http://www.sindhnewsonline.com/index.php/science/item/18093-2016-02-19-16-15-07
  41. ^ "Translate Community: Help us improve Google Translate!".
  42. ^ a b Och, Franz Josef (September 12, 2005), "Statistical Machine Translation: Foundations and Recent Advances" (PDF), The Tenth Machine Translation Summit, Phuket, Thailand, retrieved December 19, 2010 {{citation}}: |format= requires |url= (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  43. ^ "Franz Och, Ph.D., Expert in Machine Learning and Machine Translation, Joins Human Longevity, Inc. as Chief Data Scientist" (Press release). La Jolla, CA: Human Longevity, Inc. July 29, 2014. Retrieved January 15, 2015.
  44. ^ French to Russian translation translates the untranslated non-French word "obvious" from pivot (intermediate) English to Russian le mot 'obvious' n'est pas français → "очевидными" слово не французское
  45. ^ "Google Translate performs two-step translation through English" (PDF). Retrieved December 22, 2011.
  46. ^ a b "Wrong translation to Ukrainian language because going through both Russian and English". Google.
  47. ^ Google Translation mixes up "tu" and plural or polite "vous" Je vous aime. Tu es ici. You are here. → Я люблю тебя. Вы здесь. Вы здесь.
  48. ^ "Google seeks world of instant translations". ABC News. Retrieved November 8, 2015.
  49. ^ Google was an official sponsor of the annual Computational Linguistics in Japan Conference ("Gengoshorigakkai") in 2007. Google also sent a delegate to the meeting of the members of the Computational Linguistic Society of Japan in March 2005, promising funding to researchers who would be willing to share text data.
  50. ^ Google Switches to its Own Translation System, October 22, 2007
  51. ^ Barry Schwartz (October 23, 2007). "Google Translate Drops SYSTRAN for Home-Brewed Translation". Search Engine Land.
  52. ^ "Subjunctive Mood". Twitter. May 15, 2013.
  53. ^ "Google Translate doesn't really understand 'tu' and 'vous'. Particularly "tu"". Reddit. December 2, 2013.
  54. ^ a b Ethan Shen, Comparison of online machine translation tools, archived from the original on February 10, 2011, retrieved December 15, 2010
  55. ^ Christopher Pecoraro, "Microsoft Bing Translator and Google Translate Compared for Italian to English Translation", irventu.com, retrieved April 8, 2012
  56. ^ Christopher Pecoraro, "Microsoft Bing Translator and Google Translate Compared for Italian to English Translation (update)", irventu.com, retrieved April 8, 2012
  57. ^ Chrome extension Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Translate
  58. ^ Nielsen, Michael. Reinventing discovery: the new era of networked science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 125. ISBN 978-0-691-14890-8.
  59. ^ Google Translate Tangles with Computer Learning Lee Gomes, Forbes Magazine, Aug 9, 2010
  60. ^ Google Translates Ivan the Terrible as "Abraham Lincoln" google.blognewschannel.com Archived 2010-01-11 at the Wayback Machine
  61. ^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwOH3YsraNs
  62. ^ "Translate Community FAQ". Google.
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