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Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a
mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a smartphone, phone, tablet computer, tablet, or smartwatch, watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop appli ...
for Android and iOS, as well as an
API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...
that helps developers build
browser extension A browser extension is a software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow users to install a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and st ...
s and
software application Application software is any computer program that is intended for end-user use not computer operator, operating, system administration, administering or computer programming, programming the computer. An application (app, application program, sof ...
s. As of , Google Translate supports languages and language varieties at various levels. It served over 200 million people daily in May 2013, and over 500 million total users , with more than 100 billion words translated daily. Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service, it originally used
United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...
and
European Parliament The European Parliament (EP) is one of the two legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it ...
documents and transcripts to gather linguistic data. Rather than translating languages directly, it first translated text to English and then pivoted to the target language in most of the language combinations it posited in its grid, with a few exceptions including Catalan–Spanish. During a translation, it looked for patterns in millions of documents to help decide which words to choose and how to arrange them in the target language. In recent years, it has used a deep learning model to power its translations. Its accuracy, which has been criticized on several occasions, has been measured to vary greatly across languages. In November 2016, Google announced that Google Translate would switch to a neural machine translation engine – Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) – which translated "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".


History

Google Translate is a web-based free-to-use translation service developed by Google in April 2006. It translates multiple forms of texts and media such as words, phrases and webpages. Originally, Google Translate was released as a statistical machine translation (SMT) service. The input text had to be translated into English first before being translated into the selected language. Since SMT uses predictive
algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...
s 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. In January 2010, Google introduced an Android app and iOS version in February 2011 to serve as a portable personal interpreter. 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. In May 2014, Google acquired Word Lens to improve the quality of visual and voice translation. 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. In November 2016, Google transitioned its translating method to a system called neural machine translation. 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. Retrieved May 14, 2017 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. 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. A petition for Google to add
Cree The Cree, or nehinaw (, ), are a Indigenous peoples of the Americas, North American Indigenous people, numbering more than 350,000 in Canada, where they form one of the country's largest First Nations in Canada, First Nations. They live prim ...
to Google Translate was created in 2021, but it was not one of the languages in development at the time of the Translate Community's closure. At the end of September 2022, Google Translate was discontinued in
mainland China "Mainland China", also referred to as "the Chinese mainland", is a Geopolitics, geopolitical term defined as the territory under direct administration of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War. In addit ...
, which Google said was due to "low usage". In 2024, a record of 110 languages including Cantonese, Tok Pisin and some regional languages in Russia including Bashkir, Chechen, Ossetian and Crimean Tatar were added. The languages were added through the help of the PaLM 2 Generative AI model. In May 2025, users across the web found that if a
Traditional Chinese A tradition is a system of beliefs or behaviors (folk custom) passed down within a group of people or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examp ...
phrase entered in the French section is translated to
Traditional Chinese A tradition is a system of beliefs or behaviors (folk custom) passed down within a group of people or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examp ...
, Google Translate will provide strange translations. For example, if "" (;
Xi Jinping Xi Jinping, pronounced (born 15 June 1953) is a Chinese politician who has been the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (China), chairman of the Central Military Commission ...
in naked style) is entered, the translation "" (), which means "what Chinese love", will result.


Functions

Google Translate can translate multiple forms of text and media, which includes text, speech, and text within still or moving images. Specifically, its functions include: *Written Words Translation: a function that translates written words or text to a foreign language. *Website Translation: a function that translates a whole webpage to selected languages. *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. *Speech Translation: a function that instantly translates spoken language into the selected foreign language. *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. *Image Translation: a function that identifies text in a picture taken by the users and translates text on the screen instantly by images. *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. *Bilingual Conversation Translation: a function that translates conversations in multiple languages. *Transcription: a function that transcribes speech in different languages. 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.


Features


Web interface

Google Translate produces approximations across languages of multiple forms of text and media, including text, speech, websites, or text on display in still or live video images. For some languages, Google Translate can synthesize speech from text, and in certain pairs it is possible to highlight specific corresponding words and phrases between the source and target text. Results are sometimes shown with dictional information below the translation box, but it is not a dictionary and has been shown to invent translations in all languages for words it does not recognize. If "Detect language" is selected, text in an unknown language can be automatically identified. 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 In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to Data (computing), data by a user (computing), user's point and click, clicking or touchscreen, tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to ...
to a machine translation of the website. Users can save translation proposals in a "phrasebook" for later use, and a shareable URL is generated for each translation. For some languages, text can be entered via an on-screen keyboard, whether through
handwriting recognition Handwriting recognition (HWR), also known as handwritten text recognition (HTR), is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwriting, handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens ...
or speech recognition. 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. Texts written in the
Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
,
Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
,
Devanagari Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...
and Greek scripts can be automatically transliterated from their phonetic equivalents written in the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from ...
. The browser version of Google Translate provides the option to show phonetic equivalents of text translated from Japanese to English. 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 several hundred words or so. In the case of
pluricentric language A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries. Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but n ...
s, the accent depends on the region: for English, in the
Americas The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America.''Webster's New World College Dictionary'', 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio. When viewed as a sing ...
, most of the Asia–Pacific and
West Asia West Asia (also called Western Asia or Southwest Asia) is the westernmost region of Asia. As defined by most academics, UN bodies and other institutions, the subregion consists of Anatolia, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Mesopotamia, the Armenian ...
, the audio uses a female General American accent, whereas in Europe,
Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...
,
Malaysia Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia. Featuring the Tanjung Piai, southernmost point of continental Eurasia, it is a federation, federal constitutional monarchy consisting of States and federal territories of Malaysia, 13 states and thre ...
,
Singapore Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...
,
Guyana Guyana, officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, is a country on the northern coast of South America, part of the historic British West Indies. entry "Guyana" Georgetown, Guyana, Georgetown is the capital of Guyana and is also the co ...
and all other parts of the world, a female British (
Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation (RP) is the Accent (sociolinguistics), accent of British English regarded as the Standard language, standard one, carrying the highest Prestige (sociolinguistics), social prestige, since as late as the beginning of the 2 ...
) accent is used, except for a special General Australian accent used in Australia, New Zealand and
Norfolk Island Norfolk Island ( , ; ) is an States and territories of Australia, external territory of Australia located in the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and New Caledonia, directly east of Australia's Evans Head, New South Wales, Evans Head and a ...
, and an
Indian English Indian English (IndE, IE) or English (India) is a group of English dialects spoken in the Republic of India and among the Indian diaspora and native to India. English is used by the Government of India for communication, and is enshrined ...
accent used in India; for Spanish, in the
Americas The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America.''Webster's New World College Dictionary'', 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio. When viewed as a sing ...
, a
Latin American Latin Americans (; ) are the citizenship, citizens of Latin American countries (or people with cultural, ancestral or national origins in Latin America). Latin American countries and their Latin American diaspora, diasporas are Metroethnicity, ...
accent is used, while in other parts of the world, a Castilian accent is used; for French, a
Quebec Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...
accent is used in Canada, while in other parts of the world, a standard European accent is used; for Bengali, a male Bangladeshi accent is used, except in India, where a special female Indian Bengali accent is used instead. Until March 2023, some less widely spoken languages used the open-source eSpeak synthesizer for their speech; producing a robotic, awkward voice that may be difficult to understand.


Browser integration

Google Translate is available in some
web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...
s as an optional downloadable extension that can run the translation engine, which allow right-click command access to the translation service. In February 2010, Google Translate was integrated into the
Google Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, an ...
browser by default, for optional automatic webpage translation.


Mobile app

The Google Translate app for Android and iOS supports languages and can propose translations for 37 languages via photo, 32 via voice in "conversation mode", and 27 via live video imagery in "augmented reality mode". The Android app was released in January 2010, and for iOS on February 8, 2011, after an
HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...
web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...
was released for iOS users in August 2008. The Android app is compatible with devices running at least Android 2.1, while the iOS app is compatible with
iPod Touch The iPod Touch (stylized as iPod touch) is a discontinued line of iOS-based mobile devices designed and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. with a touchscreen-controlled user interface. As with other iPod models, the iPod Touch can be used as a po ...
es, iPads and
iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...
s updated to iOS 7.0+. A January 2011 Android version experimented with a "Conversation Mode" that aims to allow users to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language. Originally limited to English and Spanish, the feature received support for 12 new languages, still in testing, the following October. 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 Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronics, electronic or machine, mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo ...
(OCR) technology and gives the translation. Camera input is not available for all languages. In January 2015, the apps gained the ability to propose translations of physical signs in real time using the device's camera, as a result of Google's acquisition of the Word Lens app. The original January launch only supported seven languages, but a July update added support for 20 new languages, with the release of a new implementation that utilizes convolutional neural networks, and also enhanced the speed and quality of Conversation Mode translations (
augmented reality Augmented reality (AR), also known as mixed reality (MR), is a technology that overlays real-time 3D computer graphics, 3D-rendered computer graphics onto a portion of the real world through a display, such as a handheld device or head-mounted ...
). The feature was subsequently renamed Instant Camera. The technology underlying Instant Camera combines image processing and optical character recognition, then attempts to produce cross-language equivalents using standard Google Translate estimations for the text as it is perceived. On May 11, 2016, Google introduced ''Tap to Translate'' for Google Translate for Android. Upon highlighting text in an app that is in a foreign language, Translate will pop up inside of the app and offer translations.


API

On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the Google Translate
API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...
for
software developer Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...
s had been deprecated and would cease functioning. The Translate API page stated the reason as "substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse" with an end date set for December 1, 2011. In response to public pressure, Google announced in June 2011 that the API would continue to be available as a paid service. Because the API was used in numerous third-party websites and apps, the original decision to deprecate it led some developers to criticize Google and question the viability of using Google APIs in their products.


Google Assistant

Google Translate also provides translations for Google Assistant and the devices that Google Assistant runs on such as Google Nest and Pixel Buds.


Supported languages

the following 249 languages, dialects and language varieties written in different scripts ( unique languages and dialects) are supported by Google Translate. # Abkhaz # Acehnese # Acholi # Afar #
Afrikaans Afrikaans is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia and to a lesser extent Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and also Argentina where there is a group in Sarmiento, Chubut, Sarmiento that speaks the Pat ...
# Albanian # Alur # Amharic #
Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
#
Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian diaspora, Armenian communities around the ...
# Assamese # Avar # Awadhi # Aymara # Azerbaijani # Balinese # Baluchi # Bambara # Baoulé # Bashkir #
Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous co ...
# Batak Karo # Batak Simalungun # Batak Toba # Belarusian # Bemba # Bengali # Betawi # Bhojpuri # Bikol # Bosnian # Breton # Bulgarian # Buryat #
Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...
# Catalan # Cebuano # Chamorro # Chechen # Chichewa # Chinese ( Simplified) # Chinese ( Traditional) # Chuukese # Chuvash # Corsican # Crimean Tatar (
Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
) # Crimean Tatar (
Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
) # Croatian # Czech # Danish # Dari # Dhivehi # Dinka # Dogri # Dombe # Dutch # Dyula # Dzongkha # English #
Esperanto Esperanto (, ) is the world's most widely spoken Constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be 'the International Language' (), it is intended to be a universal second language for ...
# Estonian # Ewe # Faroese # Fijian # Filipino # Finnish # Fon # French # French (
Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...
) # Frisian # Friulian # Fulani # Ga # Galician # Georgian # German # Greek # Guarani # Gujarati #
Haitian Creole Haitian Creole (; , ; , ), or simply Creole (), is a French-based creole languages, French-based creole language spoken by 10 to 12million people worldwide, and is one of the two official languages of Haiti (the other being French), where it ...
# Hakha Chin # Hausa # Hawaiian #
Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
# Hiligaynon #
Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...
# Hmong # Hungarian # Hunsrik # Iban # Icelandic # Igbo # Ilocano # Indonesian # Inuktut (Latin) # Inuktut ( Syllabics) # Irish # Italian #
Jamaican Patois Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with influences from West African, Arawak, Spanish and other languages, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican ...
# Japanese # Javanese # Jingpo # Kalaallisut #
Kannada Kannada () is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a ...
# Kanuri # Kapampangan # Kazakh # Khasi # Khmer # Kiga # Kikongo #
Kinyarwanda Kinyarwanda, Rwandan or Rwanda, officially known as Ikinyarwanda, is a Bantu language and the national language of Rwanda. It is a dialect of the Rwanda-Rundi language that is also spoken in adjacent parts of the Democratic Republic of the ...
# Kituba # Kokborok # Komi #
Konkani __NOTOC__ Konkani may refer to: Language * Konkani language is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Konkan region of India. * Konkani alphabets, different scripts used to write the language **Konkani in the Roman script, one of the scripts used to ...
# Korean # Krio # Kurdish ( Kurmanji) # Kurdish (
Sorani Central Kurdish, also known as Sorani Kurdish, is a Kurdish dialect or a language spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan in western Iran. Central Kurdish is one of the ...
) # Kyrgyz # Lao # Latgalian #
Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
# Latvian # Ligurian #
Limburgish Limburgish ( or ; ; also Limburgian, Limburgic or Limburgan) refers to a group of South Low Franconian Variety (linguistics), varieties spoken in Belgium and the Netherlands, characterized by their distance to, and limited participation ...
#
Lingala Lingala (or Ngala, Lingala: ) is a Bantu languages, Bantu language spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser de ...
# Lithuanian # Lombard #
Luganda Ganda or Luganda ( ; ) is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda and is spoken by more than 5.56 million Ganda people, Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda, includ ...
# Luo # Luxembourgish # Macedonian # Madurese # Maithili #
Makassar Makassar ( ), formerly Ujung Pandang ( ), is the capital of the Indonesian Provinces of Indonesia, province of South Sulawesi. It is the largest city in the region of Eastern Indonesia and the country's fifth-largest urban center after Jakarta, ...
# Malagasy # Malay # Malay ( Jawi) #
Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of ...
# Maltese # Mam # Manx # Maori # Marathi # Marshallese # Marwadi # Mauritian Creole # Meadow Mari # Meiteilon (Manipuri) # Minang # Mizo # Mongolian # Myanmar (Burmese) # Nahuatl (Eastern Huasteca) # Ndau # Ndebele (South) # Nepalbhasa (Newari) # Nepali # NKo # Norwegian (
Bokmål Bokmål () (, ; ) is one of the official written standards for the Norwegian language, alongside Nynorsk. Bokmål is by far the most used written form of Norwegian today, as it is adopted by 85% to 90% of the population in Norway. There is no cou ...
) # Nuer # Occitan # Odia (Oriya) # Oromo # Ossetian # Pangasinan # Papiamento #
Pashto Pashto ( , ; , ) is an eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family, natively spoken in northwestern Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan. It has official status in Afghanistan and the Pakistani province of Khyb ...
# Persian # Polish # Portuguese (
Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
) # Portuguese (
Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country on the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe. Featuring Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point in continental Europe, Portugal borders Spain to its north and east, with which it share ...
) # Punjabi ( Gurmukhi) # Punjabi ( Shahmukhi) # Quechua # Qʼeqchiʼ # Romani # Romanian # Rundi # Russian # Sami (North) # Samoan # Sango #
Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...
# Santali (Latin) # Santali ( Ol Chiki) # Scots Gaelic # Sepedi # Serbian # Sesotho # Seychellois Creole # Shan # Shona # Sicilian # Silesian # Sindhi # Sinhala # Slovak # Slovenian # Somali # Spanish # Sundanese # Susu # Swahili # Swati # Swedish # Tahitian # Tajik #
Tamazight The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who ar ...
#
Tamazight The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who ar ...
( Tifinagh) # Tamil # Tatar # Telugu # Tetum # Thai # Tibetan # Tigrinya # Tiv # Tok Pisin # Tongan # Tshiluba #
Tsonga Tsonga may refer to: * Tsonga language, a Bantu language spoken in southern Africa * Tsonga people, a large group of people living mainly in southern Mozambique and South Africa. * Jo-Wilfried Tsonga Jo-Wilfried Tsonga (; born 17 April 1985) ...
# Tswana # Tulu # Tumbuka # Turkish # Turkmen # Tuvan # Twi # Udmurt # Ukrainian #
Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...
# Uyghur # Uzbek # Venda # Venetian # Vietnamese # Waray # Welsh # Wolof # Xhosa # Yakut #
Yiddish Yiddish, historically Judeo-German, is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in 9th-century Central Europe, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with ...
# Yoruba # Yucatec Maya # Zapotec # Zulu


Languages with text-to-speech support

the following 68 languages, dialects and language varieties currently have
text-to-speech Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conv ...
support. #
Afrikaans Afrikaans is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia and to a lesser extent Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and also Argentina where there is a group in Sarmiento, Chubut, Sarmiento that speaks the Pat ...
# Albanian # Amharic #
Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
#
Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous co ...
# Bengali # Bosnian # Bulgarian #
Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...
# Catalan # Chinese ( Simplified) # Chinese ( Traditional) # Croatian # Czech # Danish # Dutch # English # Estonian # Filipino # Finnish # French # French (
Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...
) # Galician # German # Greek # Gujarati # Hausa #
Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
#
Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...
# Hungarian # Icelandic # Indonesian # Italian # Japanese # Javanese #
Kannada Kannada () is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a ...
# Khmer # Korean #
Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
# Latvian # Lithuanian # Malay #
Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of ...
# Marathi # Myanmar (Burmese) # Nepali # Norwegian (
Bokmål Bokmål () (, ; ) is one of the official written standards for the Norwegian language, alongside Nynorsk. Bokmål is by far the most used written form of Norwegian today, as it is adopted by 85% to 90% of the population in Norway. There is no cou ...
) # Polish # Portuguese (
Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
) # Portuguese (
Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country on the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe. Featuring Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point in continental Europe, Portugal borders Spain to its north and east, with which it share ...
) # Punjabi ( Gurmukhi) # Romanian # Russian # Serbian # Sinhala # Slovak # Spanish # Sundanese # Swahili # Swedish # Tamil # Telugu # Thai # Turkish # Ukrainian #
Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...
# Vietnamese # Welsh


Languages with Dictation support

the following 72 languages, dialects and language varieties currently have dictation support. #
Afrikaans Afrikaans is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia and to a lesser extent Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and also Argentina where there is a group in Sarmiento, Chubut, Sarmiento that speaks the Pat ...
# Albanian # Amharic #
Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
#
Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian diaspora, Armenian communities around the ...
#
Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous co ...
# Bengali # Bulgarian # Catalan # Chichewa # Chinese ( Simplified) # Chinese ( Traditional) # Croatian # Czech # Danish # Dutch # English # Estonian # Filipino # Finnish # French # German # Greek # Gujarati # Hausa #
Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
#
Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...
# Hungarian # Igbo # Indonesian # Italian # Japanese #
Kannada Kannada () is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a ...
# Khmer # Korean #
Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
# Latvian # Malay #
Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of ...
# Marathi # Myanmar (Burmese) # Ndebele (South) # Nepali # Norwegian (
Bokmål Bokmål () (, ; ) is one of the official written standards for the Norwegian language, alongside Nynorsk. Bokmål is by far the most used written form of Norwegian today, as it is adopted by 85% to 90% of the population in Norway. There is no cou ...
) # Oromo # Polish # Portuguese (
Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
) # Romanian # Rundi # Russian # Serbian # Shona # Sinhala # Slovak # Somali # Spanish # Swahili # Swati # Swedish # Tamil # Telugu # Thai # Tigrinya # Tswana # Turkish # Twi # Ukrainian #
Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...
# Vietnamese # Welsh # Yoruba # Zulu


Stages

''(by chronological order of introduction)'' # 1st stage ## English to and from French ## English to and from German ## English to and from Spanish # 2nd stage ## English to and from Portuguese (
Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
) # 3rd stage ## English to and from Italian # 4th stage ## English to and from Chinese ( Simplified) ## English to and from Japanese ## English to and from Korean # 5th stage (launched April 28, 2006) ## English to and from
Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
# 6th stage (launched December 16, 2006) ## English to and from Russian # 7th stage (launched February 9, 2007) ## English to and from Chinese ( Traditional) ## Chinese (( Simplified) to and from Traditional) # 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 Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...
# 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) ## Bulgarian ## Croatian ## Czech ## Danish ## Finnish ## Norwegian (
Bokmål Bokmål () (, ; ) is one of the official written standards for the Norwegian language, alongside Nynorsk. Bokmål is by far the most used written form of Norwegian today, as it is adopted by 85% to 90% of the population in Norway. There is no cou ...
) ## Polish ## Romanian ## Swedish # 11th stage (launched September 25, 2008) ## Catalan ## Filipino ( Tagalog) ##
Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
## Indonesian ## Latvian ## Lithuanian ## Serbian ## Slovak ## Slovene ## Ukrainian ## Vietnamese # 12th stage (launched January 30, 2009) ## Albanian ## Estonian ## Galician ## Hungarian ## Maltese ## Thai ## Turkish # 13th stage (launched June 19, 2009) ## Persian # 14th stage (launched August 24, 2009) ##
Afrikaans Afrikaans is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language spoken in South Africa, Namibia and to a lesser extent Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and also Argentina where there is a group in Sarmiento, Chubut, Sarmiento that speaks the Pat ...
## Belarusian ## Icelandic ## Irish ## Macedonian ## Malay ## Swahili ## Welsh ##
Yiddish Yiddish, historically Judeo-German, is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in 9th-century Central Europe, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with ...
# 15th stage (launched November 19, 2009) ## The Beta stage is finished. Users can now choose to have the
romanization In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Latin script, Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and tra ...
written for Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Thai and Ukrainian. For translations from Arabic, Hindi and Persian, 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 Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conv ...
program in English, French, German and Italian. # 16th stage (launched January 30, 2010) ##
Haitian Creole Haitian Creole (; , ; , ), or simply Creole (), is a French-based creole languages, French-based creole language spoken by 10 to 12million people worldwide, and is one of the two official languages of Haiti (the other being French), where it ...
# 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). # 19th stage (launched May 13, 2010) ##
Armenian Armenian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus region of Eurasia * Armenians, the national people of Armenia, or people of Armenian descent ** Armenian diaspora, Armenian communities around the ...
## Azerbaijani ##
Basque Basque may refer to: * Basques, an ethnic group of Spain and France * Basque language, their language Places * Basque Country (greater region), the homeland of the Basque people with parts in both Spain and France * Basque Country (autonomous co ...
## Georgian ##
Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...
# 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 Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
# 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 (Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and Turkish), and 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) #* 5 new Indic languages (in alpha) and a transliterated input method: ## Bengali ## Gujarati ##
Kannada Kannada () is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a ...
## Tamil ## Telugu # 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) ## Speech program launched in Thai. ##
Esperanto Esperanto (, ) is the world's most widely spoken Constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be 'the International Language' (), it is intended to be a universal second language for ...
# 28th stage (launched September 2012) ## Lao # 29th stage (launched October 2012) ## Transliteration of Lao added. (alpha status) # 30th stage (launched October 2012) ## New speech program launched in English. # 31st stage (launched November 2012) ## New speech program in French, German, Italian, Latin and Spanish. # 32nd stage (launched March 2013) ## Phrasebook added. # 33rd stage (launched April 2013) ## Khmer # 34th stage (launched May 2013) ## Bosnian ## Cebuano ## Hmong ## Javanese ## Marathi # 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) ## Hausa ## Igbo ## Maori ## Mongolian ## Nepali ## Punjabi ( Gurmukhi) ## Somali ## Yoruba ## Zulu # 37th stage (launched June 2014) ## Definition of words added. # 38th stage (launched December 2014) ## Burmese ## Chewa ## Kazakh ## Malagasy ##
Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of ...
## Sinhala ## Sotho ## Sundanese ## Tajik ## Uzbek # 39th stage (launched October 2015) ## Transliteration of Arabic restored. # 40th stage (launched November 2015) ## Aurebesh # 41st stage (launched February 2016) ## Aurebesh removed. ## Speech program launched in Bengali. ## Amharic ## Corsican ## Hawaiian ## Kurdish ( Kurmanji) ## Kyrgyz ## Luxembourgish ##
Pashto Pashto ( , ; , ) is an eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family, natively spoken in northwestern Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan. It has official status in Afghanistan and the Pakistani province of Khyb ...
## Samoan ##
Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic (, ; Endonym and exonym, endonym: ), also known as Scots Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a member of the Goidelic language, Goidelic branch of Celtic, Scottish Gaelic, alongs ...
## Shona ## Sindhi ## West Frisian ## Xhosa # 42nd stage (launched September 2016) ## Speech program launched in Ukrainian. # 43rd stage (launched December 2016) ## Speech program launched in Khmer and Sinhala. # 44th stage (launched June 2018) ## Speech program launched in Burmese, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali and Telugu. # 45th stage (launched September 2019) ## Speech program launched in Gujarati, Kannada and Urdu. # 46th stage (launched February 2020) ##
Kinyarwanda Kinyarwanda, Rwandan or Rwanda, officially known as Ikinyarwanda, is a Bantu language and the national language of Rwanda. It is a dialect of the Rwanda-Rundi language that is also spoken in adjacent parts of the Democratic Republic of the ...
## Odia ## Tatar ## Turkmen ## Uyghur # 47th stage (launched February 2021) ## Speech program launched in Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Catalan, Icelandic, Latvian, and Serbian (changed from eSpeak to a natural voice). ## New speech system (WaveNet) for several languages. # 48th stage (launched January 2022) ## Speech program launched in Hebrew. # 49th stage (launched May 2022) ## Assamese ## Aymara ## Bambara ## Bhojpuri ## Dogri ## Ewe ## Guarani ## Ilocano ##
Konkani __NOTOC__ Konkani may refer to: Language * Konkani language is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Konkan region of India. * Konkani alphabets, different scripts used to write the language **Konkani in the Roman script, one of the scripts used to ...
## Krio ## Kurdish (
Sorani Central Kurdish, also known as Sorani Kurdish, is a Kurdish dialect or a language spoken in Iraq, mainly in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as the provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan in western Iran. Central Kurdish is one of the ...
) ##
Lingala Lingala (or Ngala, Lingala: ) is a Bantu languages, Bantu language spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser de ...
##
Luganda Ganda or Luganda ( ; ) is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda and is spoken by more than 5.56 million Ganda people, Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda, includ ...
## Maithili ## Maldivian ## Meitei ## Mizo ## Northern Sotho ## Oromo ## Quechua ##
Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...
## Tigrinya ##
Tsonga Tsonga may refer to: * Tsonga language, a Bantu language spoken in southern Africa * Tsonga people, a large group of people living mainly in southern Mozambique and South Africa. * Jo-Wilfried Tsonga Jo-Wilfried Tsonga (; born 17 April 1985) ...
## Twi ## eSpeak voice synthesizer removed from Armenian, Esperanto, Macedonian and Welsh. # 50th stage (launched November 2022) ## Speech program launched in Albanian, Bosnian and Swahili (changed from eSpeak to natural). ## New speech program launched in Malayalam, Marathi and Tamil. # 51st stage (launched March 2023) ## Speech program launched in Croatian (changed from eSpeak to natural). # 52nd stage (launched April 2023) ## Speech program launched in Welsh (only on Google search results). ## New speech programs launched in Chinese (simplified and traditional), German, Indonesian, Malay, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu (Chinese, German, Indonesian, Malayalam and Tamil reverted from WaveNet). # 53rd stage (launched June 2023) ## Speech program launched in Lithuanian and Punjabi. # 54th stage (launched June 2024) ## Abkhaz ## Acehnese ## Acholi ## Afar ## Alur ## Avar ## Awadhi ## Balinese ## Baluchi ## Baoulé ## Bashkir ## Batak Karo ## Batak Simalungun ## Batak Toba ## Bemba ## Betawi ## Bikol ## Breton ## Buryat ##
Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...
## Chamorro ## Chechen ## Chuukese ## Chuvash ## Crimean Tatar (
Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
) ## Dari ## Dinka ## Dombe ## Dyula ## Dzongkha ## Faroese ## Fijian ## Fon ## Friulian ## Fulani ## Ga ## Hakha Chin ## Hiligaynon ## Hunsrik ## Iban ##
Jamaican Patois Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with influences from West African, Arawak, Spanish and other languages, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican ...
## Jingpo ## Kalaallisut ## Kanuri ## Kapampangan ## Khasi ## Kiga ## Kikongo ## Kituba ## Kokborok ## Komi ## Latgalian ## Ligurian ##
Limburgish Limburgish ( or ; ; also Limburgian, Limburgic or Limburgan) refers to a group of South Low Franconian Variety (linguistics), varieties spoken in Belgium and the Netherlands, characterized by their distance to, and limited participation ...
## Lombard ## Luo ## Madurese ##
Makassar Makassar ( ), formerly Ujung Pandang ( ), is the capital of the Indonesian Provinces of Indonesia, province of South Sulawesi. It is the largest city in the region of Eastern Indonesia and the country's fifth-largest urban center after Jakarta, ...
## Malay ( Jawi) ## Mam ## Manx ## Marshallese ## Marwadi ## Mauritian Creole ## Meadow Mari ## Minang ## Nahuatl (Eastern Huasteca) ## Ndau ## Ndebele (South) ## Nepalbhasa (Newari) ## NKo ## Nuer ## Occitan ## Ossetian ## Pangasinan ## Papiamento ## Portuguese (
Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country on the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe. Featuring Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point in continental Europe, Portugal borders Spain to its north and east, with which it share ...
) ## Punjabi ( Shahmukhi) ## Qʼeqchiʼ ## Romani ## Rundi ## Sami (North) ## Sango ## Santali ## Seychellois Creole ## Shan ## Sicilian ## Silesian ## Susu ## Swati ## Tahitian ##
Tamazight The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who ar ...
##
Tamazight The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who ar ...
( Tifinagh) ## Tetum ## Tibetan ## Tiv ## Tok Pisin ## Tongan ## Tswana ## Tulu ## Tumbuka ## Tuvan ## Udmurt ## Venda ## Venetian ## Waray ## Wolof ## Yakut ## Yucatec Maya ## Zapotec ## Speech program launched in Amharic, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Galician, Hausa, and Welsh # 55th stage (launched October 2024) ## Crimean Tatar (
Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
) ## French (
Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...
) ## Inuktut (Latin) ## Inuktut ( Syllabics) ## Santali ( Ol Chiki) ## Tshiluba


Translation methodology

In April 2006, Google Translate launched with a statistical machine translation engine. 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
algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...
s in favor of statistical approaches. 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 The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...
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. Google Translate does not directly translate from one language to another (L1 → L2). Instead, it often translates first to English and then to the target language (L1 → EN → L2). However, because English, like all human languages, is ambiguous and depends on context, this can cause translation errors. For example, translating from French to Russian gives → ''you'' → ' OR '. If Google were using an unambiguous, artificial language as the intermediary, it would be → ''you'' → ' OR → ''thou'' → '. Such a suffixing of words disambiguates their different meanings. Hence, publishing in English, using unambiguous words, providing context, or 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 Haitian Creole (; , ; , ), or simply Creole (), is a French-based creole languages, French-based creole language spoken by 10 to 12million people worldwide, and is one of the two official languages of Haiti (the other being French), where it ...
( ht ↔ fr ↔ en ↔ other); * Korean ( ko ↔ ja ↔ en ↔ other); * Slovak ( sk ↔ cs ↔ en ↔ other); * Ukrainian ( uk ↔ ru ↔ en ↔ other); *
Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...
( 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 In linguistics and natural language processing, a corpus (: corpora) or text corpus is a dataset, consisting of natively digital and older, digitalized, language resources, either annotated or unannotated. Annotated, they have been used in corp ...
(or parallel collection) of more than 150–200 million words, and two monolingual corpora each of more than a billion words. Statistical
model A model is an informative representation of an object, person, or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin , . Models can be divided in ...
s from these data are then used to translate between those languages. To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used
United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...
and
European Parliament The European Parliament (EP) is one of the two legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it ...
documents and transcripts. 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. When Google Translate generates a translation proposal, it looks for
pattern A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner. A geometric pattern is a kind of pattern formed of geometric shapes and typically repeated l ...
s 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. Before October 2007, for languages other than
Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
, 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, before transitioning to neural machine translation.


Google Translate Community

Google used to have crowdsourcing features for volunteers to be a part of its "Translate Community", intended to help improve Google Translate's accuracy. Volunteers could select up to five languages to help improve translation; users could 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. In August 2016, a Google Crowdsource app was released for Android users, in which translation tasks are offered. There were three ways to contribute. First, Google showed a phrase that one should type in the translated version. Second, Google showed a proposed translation for a user to agree, disagree, or skip. Third, users could suggest translations for phrases where they think they can improve on Google's results. Tests in 44 languages showed that the "suggest an edit" feature led to an improvement in a maximum of 40% of cases over four years. Despite its role in improving translation quality and expanding language coverage, Google closed the Translate Community on March 28, 2024.


Statistical machine translation

Although Google has deployed a new system called neural machine translation for better quality translation, there are languages that still use the traditional translation method called statistical machine translation. It is a rule-based translation method that uses predictive algorithms to guess ways to translate texts in foreign languages. It aims to translate whole phrases rather than single words then gather overlapping phrases for translation. Moreover, it also analyzes bilingual text corpora to generate a statistical model that translates texts from one language to another.


Neural machine translation

In September 2016, a research team at Google announced the development of the Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT) to increase fluency and accuracy in Google Translate and in November announced that Google Translate would switch to GNMT. Google Translate's neural machine translation system used a large end-to-end
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that attempts to perform deep learning, in particular, long short-term memory networks. GNMT improved the quality of translation over SMT in some instances because it uses an example-based machine translation (EBMT) method in which the system "learns from millions of examples." According to Google researchers, it translated "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". GNMT's "proposed architecture" of "system learning" has been implemented on over a hundred languages supported by Google Translate. With the end-to-end framework, Google states but does not demonstrate for most languages that "the system learns over time to create better, more natural translations." The GNMT network attempts interlingual machine translation, which encodes the "semantics of the sentence rather than simply memorizing phrase-to-phrase translations", and the system did not invent its own universal language, but uses "the commonality found in between many languages". GNMT was first enabled for eight languages: to and from English and Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. In March 2017, it was enabled for Hindi, Russian and Vietnamese, followed by Bengali, Gujarati, Indonesian, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu in April. Since 2020, Google has phased out GNMT and has implemented deep learning networks based on transformers.


Accuracy

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. 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. 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. 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 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. Research conducted in 2011 showed that Google Translate got a slightly higher score than the
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minimum score for the English Proficiency Exam. 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. Moreover, a number of languages are translated into a sentence structure and sentence length similar to a human translation. 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. 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, 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.


Limitations

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations, struggles with
polysemy Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a Sign (semiotics), sign (e.g. a symbol, morpheme, word, or phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word h ...
(the multiple meanings a word may have) and
multiword expression A multiword expression (MWE), also called phraseme, is a lexeme-like unit made up of a sequence of two or more lexemes that has properties that are not predictable from the properties of the individual lexemes or their normal mode of combination. MW ...
s (terms that have meanings that cannot be understood or translated by analyzing the individual word units that compose them). A word in a foreign language might have two different meanings in the translated language. This might lead to mistranslation. Additionally, grammatical errors remain a major limitation to the accuracy of Google Translate. International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation (IJLLT) 2(3):196-200, 2019. Retrieved August 26, 2020 Google Translate struggles to differentiate between ''imperfect'' and ''perfect'' aspects in Romance languages. The
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is often erroneous. Moreover, the formal second person () is often chosen, whatever the context. 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. 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. 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
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that have been professionally translated by the mandate of the
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into as many as 21 languages. 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 cannot edit sentences as a whole. Instead, one must edit sometimes arbitrary sets of characters, leading to incorrect edits. The service 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. In its Written Words Translation function, there is a word limit on the amount of text that can be translated at once. Therefore, long text should be transferred to a document form and translated through its Document Translate function.


Open-source licenses and components

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 copyrighted by
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, United States. Some phrase translations come from Wikitravel.


Reviews

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


Translation mistakes and oddities

Since Google Translate uses statistical matching to translate, 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. Novelty websites like Bad Translator and Translation Party have used the service to produce humorous text by translating back and forth between multiple languages, similar to the children's game
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.


Replying to @sarah_mcdonald(s)

Certain texts in Japanese have shown to be translated to "Replying to @sarah_mcdonald(s)" in English, often with no relation to the source text. Examples include "もーるるるるるるるる", "バチバチで草" and "絵にfう". This has been asked on multiple platforms, including
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.


See also

* Apertium * Babel Fish (discontinued; redirects to the main Yahoo! site) * Baidu Fanyi * Comparison of machine translation applications * DeepL Translator * Google Dictionary *
Google Translator Toolkit Google Translator Toolkit was an online computer-assisted translation tool, computer-assisted translation Comparison of computer-assisted translation tools, tool (CAT)—a web application designed to permit translators to edit the translation ...
* Jollo (discontinued) *
List of Google products The following is a list of products, services, and apps provided by Google. Active, soon-to-be discontinued, and discontinued products, services, tools, hardware, and other applications are broken out into designated sections. Web-based products ...
* Microsoft Translator * PROMT * Reverso * Smartcat * Speech Recognition & Synthesis * SYSTRAN * Translate (Apple) * Word Lens (discontinued; merged into Google Translate app) * Yandex Translate


References


External links

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{{Authority control Google Translate Internet properties established in 2006 Machine translation software Natural language processing software Products introduced in 2006 Translation websites