Yandex.Translate

Yandex.Translation — a web service provided by Yandex, intended for translation of text or web pages into another language. Translator in English is located at the address translate.yandex.com.

The service uses a self-learning statistical machine translation,^[1] developed by.^[2] The system constructs the dictionary of correspondences based on the analysis of millions of translated texts. In order to translate the text, the computer first compares it with a database of words. The computer then compares the text to the base language models, trying to determine the meaning of an expression in the context of the text.

It should be noted that the translation function obtained in the search results pages (on the button "Translate") appeared in 2009 and was carried out on the basis of PROMT.

In addition, the translator is built into the Yandex.Browser and automatically offers to translate text from supported foreign languages.

Features

Immediately after starting translator in beta testing in the spring 2011 and were only available in three languages — Russian, English, Ukrainian, with a limit of 10 thousand characters.

As of December 2015-January 2016 is available translated to 67 languages:

The translation direction is determined automatically. Possible translation of single words, whole texts and individual web pages. When you manually enter text, the system will prompt the pop-up window. There is the possibility of a two-window view of the translation and the original web pages. In addition to machine translation, accessible and complete English-Russian and Russian-English dictionary.^[3] There is an application for devices based on iOS,^[4] Windows Phone and Android. You can listen to the pronunciation of the translation and the original text (synthesized female voice).

Translations of sentences and words can be added to "favorites" — the relevant section is below the input field.^[5]

Translator from a URL, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. This tool is intended to help the reader understand the general meaning of a text in a foreign language, but it does not provide accurate translations. According to the head of the service, Alexei Baitin, machine translation cannot by compared to a literary text.^[6] We are constantly working on the quality of translation, developed translations to other languages

According to Arkady Volozh, the mechanism of Translation is as follows: Used machine translation was based on the model of "meaning-text": taking any language, we will translate his words into a versatile above — the language of meanings and then translate these meanings into words of another language — and get the translated text. This model dominated the 70-80-ies and became automated in to the 90s. All translations of the 90-ies built on this ideology. In the 2000s came searching, and it became clear: to translate the text, you do not necessarily need to understand the meaning. Humanity translated so much already that the probability if finding two similar texts in different languages is quite large. How to determine that this is the same text? Very simple. They have a lot of the same words. If in a document of 1,000 words there are 800 words that constitute vocabulary pairs, then most likely it is translated from one language to another. And further it is possible to break the texts into paragraphs, sentences and somehow work with it. That is, the machine doesn't translate words, but ready pieces, the machine is capable of it. Actually if you think about it, this method of translation is even more in line with how people in real life language learning in childhood. After all, we hardly think in terms of "meaning-text", when we say, for example: "Grab a pear".

In addition to the free version for users, there is a commercial API online translator (free up to 10 million characters, then paid), designed primarily for the localization of sites of Internet shops and travel companies.^[7]

See also

• Machine translation
• Automatic translation
• Translate.ru
• Dictionary
• Google Translator
• Apertium
• Babel Fish
• Dicto
• PROMT
• GoldenDict
• StarDict
• WikiBhasha

References

External links

• Service Yandex.Translation
• the Official blog of the service