However, if the translation is from Russian to Spanish, there are 2 iterations, from Russian to English and then English to Spanish. English is Google’s base language, so when the process was English to say Spanish, or vice versa, there is 1 language iteration. This pairing process works when there is a vast amount of translated data. Crunching massive amounts of text, Google originally leant heavily on UN translated documents, looking for parallels between two languages that a phrase in language A corresponds to a phrase in language B. The algorithms and systems look for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents that have already been translated by human translators. Google Translate operates on statistics rather than pre-set rules. Statistical machine translation is the translation of text from one human language to another by a computer that learns how to translate from vast amounts of translated text. Clearly, there is huge demand and it provides a popular and successful service. Google continues to improve its translation service algorithms and systems and as of 2016 Google Translate boasts 103 languages, covering 99% of the online population and processes more than 1 billion user translation requests per day. Google has improved speed and accuracy of its statistical translation and covered 64 languages in 2014, translating a sentence in less than 1 second! To support the ongoing processes, in 2014 Google launched the Translate Community, “ a crowdsourcing platform designed to improve machine translation quality by leveraging knowledge of multilingual users and language enthusiasts”. That is essentially still the process today. Way back in 2012, Google Translate research scientist Franz Och announced that more than 200 million people actively used their service each month “ to put it another way: what all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day, by this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate." Google Translate was launched in 2001 with 8 languages, all translated to and from English. Given the complexity of languages in the world ( check out our translation article), those of us challenged with international communications know that quality language translation is extremely complex: it is hugely demanding of expertise and time, and so of money. As they say, “ you get what you pay for”.
Great for personal use, but bad for business. I hate Google Translate because the results I get range from an approximation to complete gibberish. I love Google Translate because it is so easy to use and it costs nothing. Google Translate boasts 103 languages, covering 99% of the online population and processes more than 1 billion user translation requests per day.
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