Google launched its translation service in April 2006 using statistical machine translation. The system routed most translations through English as an intermediate step rather than translating directly between languages.
November 2016 marked the announcement of a switch to neural machine translation called GNMT. This new engine translated whole sentences instead of piece by piece and used deep learning techniques to process context across entire phrases.
An Android app arrived in January 2010 followed by an iOS version on the 8th of February 2011. Users could translate text offline using the mobile app starting in 2013 after camera input functionality was added following the acquisition of Word Lens in May 2014.
Google closed the community on the 28th of March 2024 despite its success expanding coverage and boosting precision. Volunteers had played a crucial role in refining translation quality before the program ended and helped translate complex regional dialects that machines alone struggled to handle.
Human evaluators rated average scores at 5.43 out of six points across all tested languages. Studies showed fifty-five percent of English-to-all-102-language pairs conveyed main ideas correctly while many African Asian and Pacific languages scored significantly lower due to fewer digital resources.