Google Translate

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Google
Google Translate is a free multilingual machine translation service developed by Google, to translate text. It offers a website interface, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications. Google
Google Translate supports over 100 languages at various levels and as of May 2017, serves over 500 million people daily. Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service, it used United Nations
United Nations and European Parliament
European Parliament transcripts to gather linguistic data. Rather than translating languages directly, it first translates text to English and then to the target language. During a translation, it looks for patterns in millions of documents to help decide on the best translation. Its accuracy has been criticized and ridiculed on several occasions. In November 2016, Google
Google announced that Google
Google Translate would switch to a neural machine translation engine - Google
Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) - which translates "whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by piece. It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar". Originally only enabled for a few languages in 2016, GNMT is gradually being used for more languages.

Contents

1 Features

1.1 Browser integration 1.2 Mobile apps 1.3 API 1.4 Google
Google Assistant

2 Supported languages 3 Method of translation

3.1 Google
Google Neural Machine Translation 3.2 Crowdsourcing

4 Limitations 5 Reviews

5.1 Translation mistakes and oddities

6 Court usage 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

Features[edit] Google
Google Translate can translate multiple forms of text and media, including text, speech, images, sites, or real-time video, from one language to another.[3][4] It supports over 100 languages at various levels[5] and as of May 2017, serves over 500 million people daily.[6] For some languages, Google
Google Translate can pronounce translated text,[7] 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 automatically identified. If a user enters a URL in the source text, Google
Google Translate will produce a hyperlink to a machine translation of the website.[8] Users can save translations in a "phrasebook" for later use.[9] For some languages, text can be entered via an on-screen keyboard, through handwriting recognition, or speech recognition.[10][11] Browser integration[edit] Google
Google Translate is available in some web browsers as an optional downloadable extension that can run the translation engine.[12] In February 2010, Google
Google Translate was integrated into the Google
Google Chrome browser by default, for optional automatic webpage translation.[13] Mobile apps[edit]

Google
Google Translate

Screenshot

iOS app of Google
Google Translate, showing a Filipino translation of "Good"

Developer(s) Google

Stable release(s) [±]

Android 5.16.0.RC09.184610470 / February 26, 2018; 40 days ago (2018-02-26)[14]

iOS 5.17 / February 3, 2018; 2 months ago (2018-02-03)[15]

Platform

Android iOS

Size 13.69 MB (Android) 64.5 MB (iOS)

Type Machine translation

Website translate.google.com

The Google
Google Translate app for Android and iOS supports more than 100 languages and can translate 37 languages via photo, 32 via voice in "conversation mode", and 27 via real-time video in "augmented reality mode".[16] The Android app was released in January 2010, and for iOS on February 8, 2011.[17] A January 2011 Android version experimented with a "Conversation Mode" that allowed users to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language.[18] Originally limited to English and Spanish, the feature received support for 12 new languages, still in testing, the following October.[19] In January 2015, the apps gained the ability to translate physical signs in real time using the device's camera, as a result of Google's acquisition of the Word Lens
Word Lens app.[20][21] The original January launch only supported seven languages, but a July update added support for 20 new languages, and also enhanced the speed of Conversation Mode translations.[22][23] API[edit] In May 2011, Google
Google announced that the Google
Google Translate API for software developers had been deprecated and would cease functioning.[24] The Translate API page stated the reason as "substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse" with an end date set for December 1, 2011.[25] In response to public pressure, Google
Google announced in June 2011 that the API would continue to be available as a paid service.[26] Because the API was used in numerous third-party websites and apps, the original decision to deprecate it led some developers to criticize Google
Google and question the viability of using Google
Google APIs in their products.[27][28] Google
Google Assistant[edit] Google
Google Translate also provides translations for Google
Google Assistant and the devices that Google
Google Assistant runs on such as Google
Google Home and Google
Google Pixel Buds. Supported languages[edit] The following languages are supported in Google
Google Translate.[5]

Afrikaans Albanian Amharic Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Catalan Cebuano Chichewa Chinese Corsican Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English (American) Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Frisian Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer Korean Kurdish (Kurmanji) Kyrgyz Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Maori Marathi Mongolian Nepali Norwegian (Bokmål) Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Samoan Scots Gaelic Serbian Sesotho Shona Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu

Method of translation[edit] In April 2006, Google
Google Translate launched with a statistical machine translation engine.[1] Google
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.[29] It is based on a method called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Och who won the DARPA
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.[30] 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.[29] Statistical models from these data are then used to translate between those languages. To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google
Google used United Nations and European Parliament
European Parliament transcripts.[31][32] Google
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).[33] When Google
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
Google Translate makes intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be.[34] Before October 2007, for languages other than Arabic, Chinese and Russian, Google
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). Since October 2007, Google
Google Translate has used proprietary, in-house technology based on statistical machine translation instead.[35][36] Google
Google Neural Machine Translation[edit] Main article: Google
Google Neural Machine Translation In September 2016, a research team at Google
Google led by the software engineer Harold Gilchrist announced the development of the Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT) to increase fluency and accuracy in Google
Google Translate[2][37] and in November announced that Google
Google Translate would switch to GNMT. (wikipedia) Google
Google Translate's neural machine translation system uses a large end-to-end artificial neural network capable of deep learning,[2][38] in particular, long short-term memory networks.[39][40][41][42] GNMT improves the quality of translation because it uses an example-based machine translation (EBMT) method in which the system "learns from millions of examples."[38] It translates "whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by piece. It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar".[2] GNMT's "proposed architecture" of "system learning" was first tested on over a hundred languages supported by Google
Google Translate.[38] With the end-to-end framework, "the system learns over time to create better, more natural translations."[2] The GNMT network is capable of interlingual machine translation, which encodes the "semantics of the sentence rather than simply memorizing phrase-to-phrase translations",[38][43] and the system did not invent its own universal language, but uses "the commonality found inbetween many languages".[44] GNMT was first enabled for eight languages: to and from English and Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.[2][37] In March 2017, it was enabled for Hindi, Russian and Vietnamese languages,[45] followed by Indonesian, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu languages in April.[46] GNMT has the capability to translate directly from one language to another (L1 → L2), which improves upon the previous versions of Google
Google Translate which first translated to English and then to the target language (L1 → EN → L2).[43] The GNMT system is also capable of Zero-Shot Translation - translating between a language pair (for example, Japanese to Korean) which the "system has never explicitly seen before."[38] Crowdsourcing[edit] In 2014, Google
Google launched "Translate Community", a platform aimed at improving the translation service by seeking help from volunteers.[47][48] In August 2016, a Google
Google Crowdsource app was released for Android users, in which translation tasks are offered.[49][50] Limitations[edit] Some languages produce better results than others. Google
Google Translate performs well especially when English is the target language and the source language is from the European Union
European Union due to the prominence of translated EU parliament notes. A 2010 analysis indicated that French to English translation is relatively accurate.[51] 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.[51] Reviews[edit] Shortly after launching the translation service for the first time, Google
Google won an international competition for English– Arabic
Arabic and English–Chinese machine translation.[52] Translation mistakes and oddities[edit] Since Google
Google Translate used statistical matching to translate, translated text can often include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors,[53] sometimes swapping common terms for similar but nonequivalent common terms in the other language,[54] or inverting sentence meaning. Novelty websites like Bad Translator and Translation Party have utilized the service to produce humorous text by translating back and forth between multiple languages, similar to the children's game Chinese whispers.[55] Court usage[edit] In 2017, Google
Google Translate was used during a court hearing when court officials at Teesside Magistrates' Court failed to book an interpreter for the Chinese defendant.[56] See also[edit]

Apertium Babel Fish (discontinued; redirects to main Yahoo! site) Comparison of machine translation applications Google
Google Dictionary (discontinued) Google
Google Text-to-Speech Google
Google Translator Toolkit Jollo (discontinued) List of Google
Google products Microsoft Translator Omniscien Technologies Reverso SYSTRAN Word Lens
Word Lens (discontinued; merged into Google
Google Translate app) Yandex.Translate fanyi.baidu.com

References[edit]

^ a b Orch, Franz (April 28, 2006). "Statistical machine translation live". Google
Google Research Blog. Google. Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ a b c d e f Turovsky, Barak (November 15, 2016). "Found in translation: More accurate, fluent sentences in Google
Google Translate". The Keyword Google
Google Blog. Google. Retrieved March 23, 2017. ^ "About - Google
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Google Translate Help". Google
Google Translate Help. Google. Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ a b "See which features work with each language". Google. Retrieved July 9, 2017. ^ Shankland, Stephen (May 18, 2013). " Google
Google Translate now serves 200 million people daily". CNET. CBS Interactive. Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ "Translate written words". Google
Google Translate Help. Google. Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ "Translate text messages, webpages, or documents". Google
Google Translate Help. Google. Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ "Save translations in a phrasebook". Google
Google Translate Help. Google. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ "Translate with handwriting or virtual keyboard". Google
Google Translate Help. Google. Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ "Translate by speech". Google
Google Translate Help. Google. Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ Baldwin, Roberto (October 16, 2014). " Google
Google introduces Google Translate Chrome Extension for inline translations of text". The Next Web. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ Wauters, Robin (February 14, 2010). "Rant: Google
Google Translate Toolbar In Chrome 5 Needs An 'Off' Button". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ " Google
Google Translate APKs - APKMirror". APKMirror. Android Police. Retrieved February 7, 2018. ^ " Google
Google Translate on the App Store". App Store. Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. Retrieved February 7, 2018. ^ Setalvad, Ariha (July 29, 2015). " Google
Google Translate adds 20 new languages to video text translation". The Verge. Vox Media. Retrieved March 23, 2017. ^ Zhu, Wenzhang (February 8, 2011). "Introducing the Google
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Google Blog. Google. Retrieved March 23, 2017. ^ Hachman, Mark (January 12, 2011). " Google
Google Translate's New 'Conversation Mode': Hands On". PC Magazine. Ziff Davis. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ Velazco, Chris (October 13, 2011). " Google
Google Translate For Android Gets Upgraded "Conversation Mode"". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ Russell, Jon (January 14, 2015). " Google
Google Translate Now Does Real-Time Voice And Sign Translations On Mobile". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ Petrovan, Bogdan (January 14, 2015). " Google
Google Translate just got smarter: Word Lens
Word Lens and instant voice translations in latest update". Android Authority. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ Gush, Andrew (July 29, 2015). " Google
Google Translate adds video translation support for 25 more languages". Android Authority. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ Olanoff, Drew (July 29, 2015). " Google
Google Translate's App Now Instantly Translates Printed Text In 27 Languages". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ Feldman, Adam (May 26, 2011). "Spring cleaning for some of our APIs". Official Google
Google Code Blog. Google. Archived from the original on May 28, 2011. Retrieved December 11, 2016. ^ " Google
Google Translate API (Deprecated)". Google
Google Code. Google. Archived from the original on August 22, 2011. Retrieved December 11, 2016. ^ Feldman, Adam (June 3, 2011). "Spring cleaning for some of our APIs". Official Google
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Google pulls the rug out from under web service API developers, nixes Google
Google Translate and 17 others". ZDNet. CBS Interactive. Retrieved December 11, 2016. ^ Wong, George (May 27, 2011). " Google
Google gets rid of APIs for Translate and other services". UberGizmo. Retrieved December 11, 2016. ^ a b Och, Franz (September 12, 2005). "Statistical Machine Translation: Foundations and Recent Advances" (PDF). Google. Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ "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. ^ Adams, Tim (December 19, 2010). "Can Google
Google break the computer language barrier?". The Guardian. Guardian Media Group. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ Tanner, Adam (March 28, 2007). " Google
Google seeks world of instant translations". Reuters. Thomson Reuters. Retrieved May 28, 2017. ^ Boitet, Christian; Blanchon, Hervé; Seligman, Mark; Bellynck, Valérie. "MT on and for the Web" (PDF). Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ "Inside Google
Google Translate". Google. Archived from the original on August 22, 2010. Retrieved December 11, 2016. ^ Chitu, Alex (October 22, 2007). " Google
Google Switches to Its Own Translation System". Unofficial Google
Google Blog. Retrieved March 23, 2017. ^ Schwartz, Barry (October 23, 2007). " Google
Google Translate Drops Systran For Home Brewed Translation". Search Engine Land. Retrieved March 23, 2017. ^ a b Le, Quoc; Schuster, Mike (September 27, 2016). "A Neural Network for Machine Translation, at Production Scale". Google
Google Research Blog. Google. Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ a b c d e Schuster, Mike; Johnson, Melvin; Thorat, Nikhil (November 22, 2016). "Zero-Shot Translation with Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System". Google
Google Research Blog. Google. Retrieved March 23, 2017. ^ Sepp Hochreiter; Jürgen Schmidhuber (1997). "Long short-term memory". Neural Computation. 9 (8): 1735–1780. doi:10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735. PMID 9377276. ^ Felix A. Gers; Jürgen Schmidhuber; Fred Cummins (2000). "Learning to Forget: Continual Prediction with LSTM". Neural Computation. 12 (10): 2451–2471. doi:10.1162/089976600300015015. ^ Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation (26 Sep 2016): Yonghui Wu, Mike Schuster, Zhifeng Chen, Quoc V. Le, Mohammad Norouzi, Wolfgang Macherey, Maxim Krikun, Yuan Cao, Qin Gao, Klaus Macherey, Jeff Klingner, Apurva Shah, Melvin Johnson, Xiaobing Liu, Łukasz Kaiser, Stephan Gouws, Yoshikiyo Kato, Taku Kudo, Hideto Kazawa, Keith Stevens, George Kurian, Nishant Patil, Wei Wang, Cliff Young, Jason Smith, Jason Riesa, Alex Rudnick, Oriol Vinyals, Greg Corrado, Macduff Hughes, Jeffrey Dean. https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144 ^ "An Infusion of AI Makes Google
Google Translate More Powerful Than Ever." Cade Metz, WIRED, Date of Publication: 09.27.16. https://www.wired.com/2016/09/google-claims-ai-breakthrough-machine-translation/ ^ a b Boitet, Christian; Blanchon, Hervé; Seligman, Mark; Bellynck, Valérie (2010). "MT on and for the Web" (PDF). Retrieved December 1, 2016. ^ McDonald, Chris (January 7, 2017). "Ok slow down". Medium. Retrieved March 23, 2017. ^ Davenport, Corbin (March 6, 2017). " Google
Google Translate now uses neural machine translation for some languages". Android Police. Retrieved April 26, 2017. ^ Hager, Ryne (April 25, 2017). " Google
Google adds Indonesian and eight new Indian languages to its neural machine translation". Android Police. Retrieved April 26, 2017. ^ Lardinois, Frederic (July 25, 2014). " Google
Google Wants To Improve Its Translations Through Crowdsourcing". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved July 13, 2017. ^ Summers, Nick (July 25, 2014). " Google
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Google for free". CNET. CBS Interactive. Retrieved July 13, 2017. ^ a b Ethan Shen, Comparison of online machine translation tools, archived from the original on February 10, 2011, retrieved December 15, 2010 ^ Nielsen, Michael. Reinventing discovery: the new era of networked science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 125. ISBN 978-0-691-14890-8. ^ Gomes, Lee (July 22, 2010). " Google
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