Google Translate

Google Translate
Web address translate.google.com
Commercial? Yes
Type of site
 Machine translation
Registration Optional
Owner Google
Current status Active

Google Translate is a multilingual service provided by Google Inc. to translate written text from one language into another. It supports 90 languages.[1]

Before October 2007, for languages other than Arabic, Chinese and Russian, Google Translate was based on SYSTRAN, a software engine which is still used by several other online translation services such as Yahoo! Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo. Since October 2007, Google Translate has used proprietary, in-house technology based on statistical machine translation instead.[2][3]

On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the Google Translate API for software developers had been deprecated and would cease functioning on December 1, 2011, "due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse."[4][5] Because the API was used in numerous third-party websites, this decision led some developers to criticize Google and question the viability of using Google APIs in their products.[6][7] In response to public pressure, Google announced on June 3, 2011, that the API would continue to be available as a paid service.[4][8]

The company stated in 2013 that it served 200 million people daily.[9]

Features

English Wikipedia's homepage translated into Portuguese

Google Translate offers a web interface, mobile interfaces for Android and iOS, and an API that developers can use to build browser extensions, applications, and other software. For some languages, Google Translate can pronounce translated text, highlight corresponding words and phrases in the source and target text, and act as a simple dictionary for single-word input. If "Detect language" is selected, text in an unknown language can be identified.[10]

In the web interface, users can suggest alternate translations, such as for technical terms, or correct mistakes. These suggestions are included in future updates to the translation process. If a user enters a URL in the source text, Google Translate will produce a hyperlink to a machine translation of the website. For some languages, text can be entered via an on-screen keyboard, handwriting recognition, or speech recognition.[10] It is possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing one to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language. In 2015 the application gained the ability to translate text in real time using the device's camera, as a result of Google's acquisition of the Word Lens app.[11]

Browser integration

Google Translate is available in some browsers as an extension which can translate.

A number of Firefox extensions exist for Google services, and likewise for Google Translate, which allow right-click command access to the translation service.[12]

An extension for Google's Chrome browser also exists;[13] in February 2010, Google Translate was integrated into the standard Google Chrome browser for automatic webpage translation.[14][15]

Android version

Google Translate is available as a free downloadable application for Android OS users. The first version was launched in January 2010. It works simply like the browser version. Google translation for Android contains two main options: "SMS translation" and "History".

An early 2011 version supported Conversation Mode when translating between English and Spanish (in alpha testing). This interface within Google Translate allows users to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language. In October 2011 it was expanded to 14 languages.[16]

The application supports 80 languages and voice input for 15 languages. It is available for devices running Android 2.1 and above and can be downloaded by searching for "Google Translate" in Google Play. It was first released in January 2010, with an improved version available on January 12, 2011.[17]

The 'Camera input' functionality allows users to take a photograph of a document, signboard, etc. Google Translate recognises the text from the image using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and gives the translation. Camera input is not available for all languages.

Latest version: 2.0.0 build 42.

iOS version

In August 2008, Google launched a Google Translate HTML5 web application for iOS for iPhone and iPod Touch users. The official iOS app for Google Translate was released February 8, 2011. It accepts voice input for 15 languages and allows translation of a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. Translations can be spoken out loud in 23 different languages.[18]

Limitations

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. The service limits the number of paragraphs and the range of technical terms that can be translated, and while it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations and most times, it tends to repeat verbatim the same word it's expected to translate. Grammatically, for example, Google Translate struggles to differentiate between imperfect and perfect tenses in Romance languages so habitual and continuous acts in the past often become single historical events. Although seemingly pedantic, this can often lead incorrect results (to a native speaker of for example French and Spanish) which would have been avoided by a human translator. Knowledge of the subjunctive mood is virtually non-existent.[19] Moreover the informal second person (tu) is often chosen, whatever the context or accepted usage.[20] These nuances require some contextual understanding and feeling, something which no automatic translation tool can achieve because it would essentially have to think like a person. The alternative view is that there are simple grammatical rules which could easily be incorporated into the software to improve matters. The reason for Google Translate's apparent "lack of humanity" is its methodology (see below) which was devised (and championed by) Franz Josef Och who was a computer scientist rather than a linguist. Since its English reference material contains only "you" forms, it is difficult to translate into a language which has more.

Some languages produce better results than others. Google Translate performs well especially when English is the target language and the source language is from the European Union due to the prominence of translated EU parliament notes. A 2010 analysis indicated that French to English translation is relatively accurate,[21] and 2011 and 2012 analyses showed that Italian to English translation is relatively accurate as well.[22][23] However, if the source text is shorter, rule-based machine translations often perform better; this effect is particularly evident in Chinese to English translations. While edits of translations may be submitted, in Chinese specifically one is not able to edit sentences as a whole. Instead, one must edit sometimes arbitrary sets of characters, leading to incorrect edits.[21]

Texts written in the Greek, Devanagari, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts can be transliterated automatically from phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet. The browser version of the Google translator provides the read phonetically option for Japanese to English conversion. The same option is not available on the paid API version.

Accent of English that the "text-to-speech" audio of Google translate of each country uses
  British English (female)
  American English (female)
  Oceania accent (female)
  No Google translate service

Many of the more popular languages have a "text-to-speech" audio function that is able to read back a text in that language, up to a few dozen words or so. In the case of pluricentric languages, the accent depends on the region: for English, in the Americas, most of the Asia-Pacific and West Asia the audio uses a female General American accent, whereas in Europe, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Guyana and all other parts of the world a female British English accent is used, except for a special Oceania accent used in Australia, New Zealand and Norfolk lsland; for Spanish, in the Americas a Latin American Spanish accent is used, while in the other parts of the world a Castilian Spanish accent is used; Portuguese uses a São Paulo accent in the world, except for Portugal, where their native accent is used. Some less widely spoken languages use the open-source eSpeak synthesizer for their speech; producing a robotic, awkward voice that may be difficult to understand.

Supported languages

  • English to German
  • English to Spanish
      
  • French to English
  • German to English
  • Spanish to English
  • Portuguese to English
     
  • Italian to English
  • English to Chinese (Simplified)
  • English to Japanese
  • English to Korean
      
  • Chinese (Simplified) to English
  • Japanese to English
  • Korean to English
  • Arabic to English
  • English to Russian
  • Russian to English
  • English to Chinese (Traditional)
  • Chinese (Simplified to Traditional)
      
  • Chinese (Traditional) to English
  • Chinese (Traditional to Simplified)
  • English to Hindi
  • Hindi to English
           
                 
               
                       
               
  • Provides romanization for Arabic.
  • Allows phonetic typing for Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Serbian and Urdu.
  • Latin[27]

Languages not yet supported by Google Translate

Languages not yet supported by Google Translate, but in process.[32]

  1. Cantonese
  2. Cherokee
  3. Corsican
  4. Dzongkha
  5. Frisian
  6. Guarani
  7. Hawaiian
  8. Kinyarwanda
  9. Kurdish (Kurmanji)
  10. Kurdish (Sorani)
  11. Kyrgyz
  12. Luxembourgish
  13. Oriya
  14. Pashto
  15. Romansh
  16. Samoan
  17. Scots Gaelic
  18. Shona
  19. Sindhi
  20. Tatar
  21. Tibetan
  22. Turkmen
  23. Uighur
  24. Wolof
  25. Xhosa

Translation methodology

Google Translate does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis. The system's original creator, Franz Josef Och, has criticized the effectiveness of rule-based algorithms in favor of statistical approaches.[33] It is based on a method called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003. Och was the head of Google's machine translation group until leaving to join Human Longevity, Inc. in July 2014.[34]

Google Translate does not translate from one language to another (L1 → L2). Instead, it often translates first to English and then to the target language (L1 → EN → L2).[35][36][37][38] However, because English, like all human languages, is ambiguous and depends on context, this can cause translation errors. For example, translating vous from French to Russian gives vous → you → ты OR Bы/вы.[39] If Google were using an unambiguous, artificial language as the intermediary, it would be vous → you → Bы/вы OR tu → thou → ты. Such a suffixing of words disambiguates their different meanings. Hence, publishing in English, using unambiguous words, providing context, using expressions such as "you all" often make a better one-step translation.

The following languages do not have a direct Google translation to or from English. These languages are translated through the indicated intermediate language (which in all cases is closely related to the desired language but more widely spoken) in addition to through English:

According to Och, a solid base for developing a usable statistical machine translation system for a new pair of languages from scratch would consist of a bilingual text corpus (or parallel collection) of more than a million words, and two monolingual corpora each of more than a billion words.[33] Statistical models from these data are then used to translate between those languages.

To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used United Nations documents.[40] The UN typically publishes documents in all six official UN languages, which has produced a very large 6-language corpus.

Google representatives have been involved with domestic conferences in Japan where Google has solicited bilingual data from researchers.[41]

When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate makes intelligent guesses (AI) as to what an appropriate translation should be.[42]

Open-source licenses and components

Language Wordnet Licence
Albanian Albanet CC-BY 3.0/GPL 3
Arabic Arabic Wordnet CC-BY-SA 3
Chinese Chinese Wordnet Wordnet
Danish Dannet Wordnet
English Princeton Wordnet Wordnet
Hindi IIT Bombay Wordnet Indo Wordnet
Farsi/Persian Persian Wordnet Free to Use
Finnish FinnWordnet Wordnet
French WOLF (WOrdnet Libre du Français) CeCILL-C
Hebrew Hebrew Wordnet Wordnet
Italian MultiWordnet CC-BY-3.0
Japanese Japanese Wordnet Wordnet
Catalan Multilingual Central Repository CC-BY-3.0
Galilean Multilingual Central Repository CC-BY-3.0
Spanish Multilingual Central Repository CC-BY-3.0
Indonesian Wordnet Bahasa MIT
Malaysian Wordnet Bahasa MIT
Norwegian Norwegian Wordnet Wordnet
Polish plWordnet Wordnet
Portuguese OpeanWN-PT CC-BY-SA-3.0
Javanese Javanese Wordnet Wordnet
Thai Thai Wordnet Wordnet

[43]

Reviews

Shortly after launching the translation service, Google won an international competition for English–Arabic and English–Chinese machine translation.[44]

Translation mistakes and oddities

Since Google Translate uses statistical matching to translate rather than a dictionary/grammar rules approach, translated text can often include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors,[45] often swapping common terms for similar but nonequivalent common terms in the other language,[46] as well as inverting sentence meaning. Also, for the speech, it uses only European French as well as Latin American Spanish worldwide, but both Portugal and Brazilian Portuguese (European for translate.google.pt and Brazilian for all other Google Translate sites).

Controversies

Google has been accused of sexism due to the statistical assignment of gender when translating from or through English into languages where verbs are conjugated by gender. For example, the phrase I drive used to be translated into a masculine conjugation, while I cook into a feminine conjugation, due to the higher occurrence of such forms in corpora. Due to public criticism in Israel, Google has manually fixed some apparent cases of sexist translation into Hebrew by using the masculine form for all verbs.

Translate Community

Translate community is a platform that is intended to improve Google Translate service. Volunteers can select up to five languages to help in better translation. Users can verify translated phrases and translate phrases in their languages to and from English, helping to improve the accuracy of translating more rare and complex phrases.[47]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Как работает Google Переводчик – Google Переводчик". google.com.
  2. ↑ Google Switches to its Own Translation System, October 22, 2007
  3. ↑ Google Translate Drops Systran for Home-Brewed Translation December 23, 2007. Barry Schwartz, searchengineland.com
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Feldman, Adam (May 26, 2011). "Spring cleaning for some of our APIs". Google Code. Retrieved May 28, 2011.
  5. ↑ "Google Translate API (Deprecated)". Google Code. Archived from the original on May 28, 2011. Retrieved May 28, 2011.
  6. ↑ Wong, George (May 27, 2011). "Google gets rid of APIs for Translate and other services". UberGizmo. Retrieved May 28, 2011.
  7. ↑ Burnette, Ed (May 27, 2011). "Google pulls the rug out from under web service API developers, nixes Google Translate and 17 others". ZDNet. Retrieved May 28, 2011.
  8. ↑ "Google cancels plan to shutdown Translate API. To start charging for translations". June 4, 2011. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
  9. ↑ Shankland, Stephen. "Google Translate now serves 200 million people daily". CNET. CBS Interactive Inc. Retrieved 17 October 2014.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Google Translate Help". Google. Retrieved June 4, 2014.
  11. ↑ "Official Google Blog: Hallo, hola, olá to the new, more powerful Google Translate app". Official Google Blog.
  12. ↑ "Search Add-ons :: Add-ons for Firefox". Mozilla. Retrieved August 7, 2009.
  13. ↑ Google Translate by chrome.translate.extension chrome.google.com
  14. ↑ "Google Translate Integrated in Google Chrome 5". Ghacks.net. February 14, 2010. Retrieved December 22, 2011.
  15. ↑ Google Chrome 5 features an integrated Google Translate service February 15, 2010. stuff.techwhack.com
  16. ↑ Gigaom.com 2011 October 13 by Ryan Kim. Google Translate conversation mode expands to 14 languages
  17. ↑ A new look for Google Translate for Android, Awaneesh Verma, Google Translate Blog, January 12, 2011
  18. ↑ Introducing the Google Translate app for iPhone, Wenzhang Zhu, Google Translate Blog, February 8, 2011
  19. ↑ "Subjunctive Mood‏". Twitter. Subjunctive Mood. 5:40 PM - 15 May 2013. Retrieved 2015-03-21. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  20. ↑ . Reddit. 2014 http://www.reddit.com/r/French/comments/1rw4iq/google_translate_doesnt_really_understand_tu_and/. Retrieved 2015-03-21. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Ethan Shen, Comparison of online machine translation tools, archived from the original on February 10, 2011, retrieved December 15, 2010
  22. ↑ Christopher Pecoraro, "Microsoft Bing Translator and Google Translate Compared for Italian to English Translation", irventu.com, retrieved April 8, 2012
  23. ↑ Christopher Pecoraro, "Microsoft Bing Translator and Google Translate Compared for Italian to English Translation (update)", irventu.com, retrieved April 8, 2012
  24. ↑ Statistical machine translation live, Franz Josef Och, Google Research Blog, April 28, 2006
  25. ↑ Henderson, Fergus (November 5, 2010). "Giving a voice to more languages on Google Translate". Official Google Blog. Retrieved December 22, 2011.
  26. ↑ "Five more languages on Google Translate". Google Translate Blog. May 13, 2010. Retrieved December 22, 2011.
  27. ↑ Jakob Uszkoreit, Ingeniarius Programmandi (September 30, 2010). "Veni, Vidi, Verba Verti". Official Google Blog. Retrieved December 22, 2011.
  28. ↑ SVOX
  29. ↑ "Google Translate Blog: Google Translate welcomes you to the Indic web". Google Translate Blog.
  30. ↑ Brants, Thorsten (September 13, 2012). "Translating Lao". Google Translate Blog. Retrieved September 19, 2012.
  31. ↑ Crum, Chris (September 13, 2012). "Google Adds its 65th Language to Google Translate with Lao". WebProNews. Retrieved September 19, 2012.
  32. ↑ "Translate Community: Help us improve Google Translate!". google.com.
  33. ↑ 33.0 33.1 Och, Franz Josef (September 12, 2005), "Statistical Machine Translation: Foundations and Recent Advances" (PDF), The Tenth Machine Translation Summit (PDF), Phuket, Thailand, retrieved December 19, 2010
  34. ↑ "Franz Och, Ph.D., Expert in Machine Learning and Machine Translation, Joins Human Longevity, Inc. as Chief Data Scientist" (Press release). La Jolla, CA: Human Longevity, Inc. 29 July 2014. Retrieved 15 January 2015.
  35. ↑ French to Russian translation translates the untranslated non-French word "obvious" from pivot (intermediate) English to Russian le mot 'obvious' n'est pas français → "очевидными" слово не французское
  36. ↑ We pretend that this English article is German when asking Google to translate it to French. Google, because it does not find the English words in the German dictionary, leaves those words unchanged as one can show it with this spelllling misssstake. But it translates them to French nonetheless. That's because Google translates German → English → French and that the unchanged English words undergo the second translation. The word "außergewöhnlich" however will be translated twice.
  37. ↑ "Google Translate performs two-step translation through English" (PDF). Retrieved December 22, 2011.
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 "Wrong translation to Ukrainian language because going through both Russian and English". google.com.
  39. ↑ Google Translation mixes up "tu" and plural or polite "vous" Je vous aime. Tu es ici. You are here. → Я люблю тебя. Вы здесь. Вы здесь.
  40. ↑ Google seeks world of instant translations (Reuters)
  41. ↑ Google was an official sponsor of the annual Computational Linguistics in Japan Conference ("Gengoshorigakkai") in 2007. Google also sent a delegate to the meeting of the members of the Computational Linguistic Society of Japan in March 2005, promising funding to researchers who would be willing to share text data.
  42. ↑ "Inside Google Translate – Google Translate". google.com.
  43. ↑ "Inside Google Translate – Google Translate". google.com.
  44. ↑ Nielsen, Michael. Reinventing discovery: the new era of networked science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 125. ISBN 978-0-691-14890-8.
  45. ↑ Google Translate Tangles with Computer Learning Lee Gomes, Forbes Magazine, Aug 9, 2010
  46. ↑ Google Translates Ivan the Terrible as “Abraham Lincoln” google.blognewschannel.com
  47. ↑ "Google Translate Community FAQ". google.com.

External links