When was Google Translate launched?
Google Translate launched on the 28th of April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service. It initially translated text by routing it through English as an intermediate language before reaching the target.
Questions about Google Translate
Short answers, pulled from the story.
How many people use Google Translate daily?
Google Translate served over 200 million people daily as of May 2013, with more than 500 million total users. More than 100 billion words were being translated each day at that time.
What is Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) and when did Google switch to it?
Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) is a deep learning system that translates whole sentences at a time rather than piece by piece. Google announced GNMT in September 2016 and switched Google Translate to it in November 2016. Since 2020, Google has further transitioned to transformer-based deep learning networks, phasing out GNMT.
How accurate is Google Translate compared to human translation?
Google Translate is less reliable than human translation. A human evaluation found that the main idea of a text is conveyed more than 50% of the time for only 35 out of 102 languages tested. In Google's own internal tests, native speakers rated translations on a scale of 0 to 6, and Google Translate averaged 5.43.
Why does Google Translate route translations through English?
For most language pairs, Google Translate translates the source text into English first and then into the target language. This approach stems from the statistical method requiring large bilingual corpora, which are far more available for English than for direct pairs between other languages. A small set of language pairs use a different intermediate language, such as Catalan routing through Spanish.
How many languages does Google Translate support?
Google Translate supports 249 languages, dialects, and language varieties. In 2024 alone, a record 110 languages were added, including Cantonese, Tok Pisin, Bashkir, Chechen, Ossetian, and Crimean Tatar, with the additions made possible through the PaLM 2 Generative AI model.