Google Translate

Google Translate is a web-based free-to-user translation service developed by Google in April 2006.[11] It translates multiple forms of texts and media such as words, phrases and webpages.

Originally, Google Translate was released as a statistical machine translation service.[11] The input text had to be translated into English first before being translated into the selected language.[11] Since SMT uses predictive algorithms to translate text, it had poor grammatical accuracy. Despite this, Google initially did not hire experts to resolve this limitation due to the ever-evolving nature of language.[11]

In January 2010, Google introduced an Android app and iOS version in February 2011 to serve as a portable personal interpreter.[11] As of February 2010, it was integrated into browsers such as Chrome and was able to pronounce the translated text, automatically recognize words in a picture and spot unfamiliar text and languages.[11]

In May 2014, Google acquired Word Lens to improve the quality of visual and voice translation.[12] It is able to scan text or a picture using the device and have it translated instantly. Moreover, the system automatically identifies foreign languages and translates speech without requiring individuals to tap the microphone button whenever speech translation is needed.[12]

In November 2016, Google transitioned its translating method to a system called neural machine translation.[13] It uses deep learning techniques to translate whole sentences at a time, which has been measured to be more accurate between English and French, German, Spanish, and Chinese.[14] No measurement results have been provided by Google researchers for GNMT from English to other languages, other languages to English, or between language pairs that do not include English. As of 2018, it translates more than 100 billion words a day.[13]

In 2017, Google Translate was used during a court hearing when court officials at Teesside Magistrates' Court failed to book an interpreter for the Chinese defendant.[15]

At the end of September 2022, Google Translate was discontinued in mainland China, which Google said was due to "low usage".[16][17]

Google Translate can translate multiple forms of text and media, which includes text, speech, and text within still or moving images.[18][19] Specifically, its functions include:

• Written Words Translation: a function that translates written words or text to a foreign language.[20]
• Website Translation: a function that translates a whole webpage to selected languages.[21]
• Document Translation: a function that translates a document uploaded by the users to selected languages. The documents should be in the form of: .doc, .docx, .odf, .pdf, .ppt, .pptx, .ps, .rtf, .txt, .xls, .xlsx.[21]
• Speech Translation: a function that instantly translates spoken language into the selected foreign language.[22]
• Mobile App Translation: in 2018, Google introduced its new Google Translate feature called "Tap to Translate", which made instant translation accessible inside any app without exiting or switching it.[23]
• Image Translation: a function that identifies text in a picture taken by the users and translates text on the screen instantly by images.[24]
• Handwritten Translation: a function that translates language that are handwritten on the phone screen or drawn on a virtual keyboard without the support of a keyboard.[25]
• Bilingual Conversation Translation: a function that translates conversations in multiple languages.[26]
• Transcription: a function that transcribes speech in different languages.[27]

For most of its features, Google Translate provides the pronunciation, dictionary, and listening to translation. Additionally, Google Translate has introduced its own Translate app, so translation is available with a mobile phone in offline mode.[18][19]

As of October 2023, the following 133 languages are supported by Google Translate:[62]

In April 2006, Google Translate launched with a statistical machine translation engine.[1]

Google Translate does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical or pattern 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.[75][76] Original versions of Google Translate were 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.[77]

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).[78][79][80][7][81] 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.[82] 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" may or may not make a better one-step translation depending on the target language.

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:

• Belarusian (be ↔ ru ↔ en ↔ other);
• Catalan (ca ↔ es ↔ en ↔ other);
• Galician (gl ↔ pt ↔ en ↔ other);
• Haitian Creole (ht ↔ fr ↔ en ↔ other);
• Korean (ko ↔ ja ↔ en ↔ other);
• Slovak (sk ↔ cs ↔ en ↔ other);
• Ukrainian (uk ↔ ru ↔ en ↔ other);[81]
• Urdu (ur ↔ hi ↔ en ↔ other).

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.[75] 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 and European Parliament documents and transcripts.[83][84] 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 it has solicited bilingual data from researchers.[85]

When Google Translate generates a translation proposal, 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 informed guesses (AI) as to what an appropriate translation should be.[86]

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 Babel Fish (now defunct). From October 2007, Google Translate used proprietary, in-house technology based on statistical machine translation instead,[87][88] before transitioning to neural machine translation.

Google Translate is not as reliable as human translation. When text is well-structured, written using formal language, with simple sentences, relating to formal topics for which training data is ample, it often produces conversions similar to human translations between English and a number of high-resource languages.[109][13] Accuracy decreases for those languages when fewer of those conditions apply, for example when sentence length increases or the text uses familiar or literary language. For many other languages vis-à-vis English, it can produce the gist of text in those formal circumstances.[110] Human evaluation from English to all 102 languages shows that the main idea of a text is conveyed more than 50% of the time for 35 languages. For 67 languages, a minimally comprehensible result is not achieved 50% of the time or greater.[10] A few studies have evaluated Chinese, French, German, and Spanish to English, but no systematic human evaluation has been conducted from most Google Translate languages to English. Speculative language-to-language scores extrapolated from English-to-other measurements[10] indicate that Google Translate will produce translation results that convey the gist of a text from one language to another more than half the time in about 1% of language pairs, where neither language is English.[111] Research conducted in 2011 showed that Google Translate got a slightly higher score than the UCLA minimum score for the English Proficiency Exam.[112] Due to its identical choice of words without considering the flexibility of choosing alternative words or expressions, it produces a relatively similar translation to human translation from the perspective of formality, referential cohesion, and conceptual cohesion.[113] Moreover, a number of languages are translated into a sentence structure and sentence length similar to a human translation.[113] Furthermore, Google carried out a test that required native speakers of each language to rate the translation on a scale between 0 and 6, and Google Translate scored 5.43 on average.[13]

When used as a dictionary to translate single words, Google Translate is highly inaccurate because it must guess between polysemic words. Among the top 100 words in the English language, which make up more than 50% of all written English, the average word has more than 15 senses,[114] which makes the odds against a correct translation about 15 to 1 if each sense maps to a different word in the target language. Most common English words have at least two senses, which produces 50/50 odds in the likely case that the target language uses different words for those different senses. The odds are similar from other languages to English. Google Translate makes statistical guesses that raise the likelihood of producing the most frequent sense of a word, with the consequence that an accurate translation will be unobtainable in cases that do not match the majority or plurality corpus occurrence. The accuracy of single-word predictions has not been measured for any language. Because almost all non-English language pairs pivot through English, the odds against obtaining accurate single-word translations from one non-English language to another can be estimated by multiplying the number of senses in the source language with the number of senses each of those terms have in English. When Google Translate does not have a word in its vocabulary, it makes up a result as part of its algorithm.[29]

Google Translate's inaccuracy can be illustrated by translating from one language to another then back to the original language. This will often result in nonsensical constructions, rather than recovering the original text.

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 is expected to translate. Grammatically, for example, Google Translate struggles to differentiate between imperfect and perfect aspects in Romance languages so habitual and continuous acts in the past often become single historical events. Although seemingly pedantic, this can often lead to 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. Moreover, the formal second person (vous) is often chosen, whatever the context or accepted usage. Since its English reference material contains only "you" forms, it has difficulty translating a language with "you all" or formal "you" variations.

Due to differences between languages in investment, research, and the extent of digital resources, the accuracy of Google Translate varies greatly among languages.[13] Some languages produce better results than others. Most languages from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, tend to score poorly in relation to the scores of many well-financed European languages, Afrikaans and Chinese being the high-scoring exceptions from their continents.[10][115] No languages indigenous to Australia are included within Google Translate. Higher scores for European can be partially attributed to the Europarl Corpus, a trove of documents from the European Parliament that have been professionally translated by the mandate of the European Union into as many as 21 languages. A 2010 analysis indicated that French to English translation is relatively accurate,[116] and 2011 and 2012 analyses showed that Italian to English translation is relatively accurate as well.[117][118] 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 cannot edit sentences as a whole. Instead, one must edit sometimes arbitrary sets of characters, leading to incorrect edits.[116] A good example is Russian-to-English. Formerly one would use Google Translate to make a draft and then use a dictionary and common sense to correct the numerous mistakes. As of early 2018 Translate is sufficiently accurate to make the Russian Wikipedia accessible to those who can read English. The quality of Translate can be checked by adding it as an extension to Chrome or Firefox and applying it to the left language links of any Wikipedia article. It can be used as a dictionary by typing in words. One can translate from a book by using a scanner and an OCR like Google Drive, but this takes about five minutes per page.

In its Written Words Translation function, there is a word limit on the amount of text that can be translated at once.[20] Therefore, long text should be transferred to a document form and translated through its Document Translate function.[20]

Moreover, like all machine translation programs, Google Translate struggles with polysemy (the multiple meanings a word may have)[119][13] and multiword expressions (terms that have meanings that cannot be understood or translated by analyzing the individual word units that compose them).[120] A word in a foreign language might have two different meanings in the translated language. This might lead to mistranslations.

Additionally, grammatical errors remain a major limitation to the accuracy of Google Translate.[121]

Irish language data from Foras na Gaeilge's New English-Irish Dictionary (English database designed and developed for Foras na Gaeilge by Lexicography MasterClass Ltd.)

Welsh language data from Gweiadur by Gwerin.

Certain content is copyright Oxford University Press USA. Some phrase translations come from Wikitravel.[122]

Shortly after launching the translation service for the first time, Google won an international competition for English–Arabic and English–Chinese machine translation.[123]

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