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Google Translate

URL	http://translate.google.com/
Type of site	translation
Registration	no
Owner	Google
Created by	Google
Current status	Active

Google Translate is a service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, or a webpage, into another language. The service limits the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, that will be translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language. ^[1] For some languages, users are asked for alternate translations such as for technical terms, to be included for future updates to the translation process. Text in a foreign language can be typed, and if "Detect Language" is selected, it will not only detect the language, but it will translate into English by default.

Unlike other translation services such as Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo which use SYSTRAN, Google uses its own translation software. Some say that this could lead to a revolution in modern language industry.^[2]

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations. Some languages produce better results than others.^{[citation needed]}

It does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis.^[3]

Languages written in Devanagari or the Arabic script and its variants can be transliterated automatically from phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet.

Approach

Google translate is based on an approach called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Franz-Josef Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003. Och is now the head of Google's machine translation department.

According to Och,^[4] a solid base for developing a usable statistical machine translation system for a new pair of languages from scratch, would consist in having a bilingual text corpus (or parallel collection) of more than a million words and two monolingual corpora of each more than a billion words. Statistical models from this data are then used to translate between those languages.

To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used United Nations documents. ^[5] The same document is normally available in all six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish), thus Google now has a 6-language corpus of 20 billion words' worth of human translations.^{[citation needed]}

The availability of Arabic and Chinese as official UN languages is probably one of the reasons why Google Translate initially focused on the development of translation between English and those languages, and not, for example, Japanese and German, which are not official languages at the UN.

Google representatives have been very active at domestic conferences in Japan in the field asking researchers to provide them with bilingual corpora.^[6]

Options

(by chronological order)

• 1st stage

• 2nd stage
  • English to Portuguese
  • Portuguese to English
  • English to Dutch
  • Dutch to English

• 3rd stage
  • English to Italian
  • Italian to English
• 4th stage

• 5th stage (launched December 2006)
  • English to Russian
  • Russian to English

• 6th stage (launched April 2007)
  • English to Arabic
  • Arabic to English
• 7th stage (launched February 2007)

• 8th stage (launched October 2007)
  • all 25 language pairs use Google's machine translation system

• 9th stage
  • English to Hindi
  • Hindi to English

• 10th stage (as of this stage, translation can be done between any two languages, going through English, if needed) (launched May 2008)

• 11th stage (launched September 25, 2008)

• 12th stage (launched January 30, 2009)

• 13th stage (launched June 19, 2009)

• 14th stage (launched August 24, 2009)

• 15th stage (launched November 19, 2009)
  • The Beta stage is finished. Users can now choose to have the romanization written for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hindi and Thai. For translations from Arabic, Persian and Hindi, the user can enter a Latin transliteration of the text and the text will be translated to the native script for these languages as the user is writing. The text can now be read by a text-to-speech program in English.
• 16th stage (launched January 30, 2010)
  • Haitian Creole

Language Codes

Browser integration

A number of Firefox extensions exist for Google services, and likewise for Google Translate, which allow right-click command access to the translation service. ^[7]

References

See also

• Comparison of machine translation applications
• Google Dictionary
• List of Google services and tools
• Babel Fish (website)
• Bing Translator
• Asia Online

External links

• Home page
• Google Translate Client for Windows
• Franz Josef Och
• Google translate, statistical machine translation live
• Google Translator with Human Touch
• Google Translator Opera widget