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Google has announced via blog post that their Google Translate service is used by more than 200 million people each month. Broken down further, in any given day, Google translates the equivalent to as much text as you’d find in 1 million books.
Franz Och, a research scientist with Google Translate, discusses how Google’s translation service has progressed over the years. In 2001, Google started offering a service that would translate eight different languages to and from English. It used state-of-the-art commercial machine translation (MT) and while it did work, it wasn’t very effective or efficient.
The service didn’t improve much over the next couple of years, either. In 2003, Google made a concerted effort to better the service, hiring Och away from his research position at DARPA. Using the search giant’s massive computing infrastructure, the team was able to get some pretty strong results although it still wasn’t quick enough for practical use. It took Google 40 hours and 1,000 computers to translate 1,000 sentences.
The team continued to optimize the system and only a year later, the service could translate a full sentence every second. The MT approach was unveiled in April 2006 and within the past six years, the translation division has worked on quality and language coverage.
Users can now translate 64 different languages through translate.google.com or via mobile apps and Chrome. The ultimate vision is a world where anyone can consume and share data, regardless of what language it’s presented in.
User Comments: 5
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It sure comes in handy for insulting Brazilians and Russians over online games.
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English to Dutch to English of the first two paragraphs. That is certainly a lot better than in the early days. Impressive.
"Google has announced via their blog post that Google Translate service is used by more than 200 million people per month. Broken down further, in a given day, Google translates it equals as much text as you would find in 1 million books.
Franz Och, a research scientist with Google Translate, discusses how Google's translation service has progressed over the years. In 2001, Google began offering a service that would translate into eight different languages ??and English. Historically, state-of-the-art commercial machine translation (MT) and while it worked, it was not very effective or efficient."
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It's still buggy (too slow) and doesn't work, moreso on Taiwan websites. This site [link] comes up with "Sorry, we are unable to access the page you requested"
Otherwise for Europe I find it priceless. Reading/posting responses in YT is the main use. Shame I have to copy/paste everytime but glad its free.
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I've used Google translate quite a few times with moderate success. Some of the things it produces can be funny as hell though. Example: type "men are men and men do the cooking", translate into Dutch, then the translation back to English.
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I speak 3 languages and still use it a fair amount .
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