Google Translate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Google Translate is a free multilingual machine translation service developed by
Google,
to translate text, speech, images, sites, or real-time video from one
language into another. It offers a web interface, mobile apps for
Android and
iOS, and an
API that helps developers build
browser extensions and software applications. Google Translate supports over 100 languages at various levels
[3] and as of May 2013, serves over 200 million people daily.
[4]
In November 2016, Google announced that Google Translate would switch to a
neural machine translation engine -
Google Neural Machine Translation
(GNMT) - which translates "whole sentences at a time, rather than just
piece by piece. It uses this broader context to help it figure out the
most relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be
more like a human speaking with proper grammar". GNMT was first enabled
for eight languages: to and from English and Chinese, French, German,
Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.
[2][5]
Features
Google
Translate can translate multiple forms of text and media, including
text, speech, images, sites, or real-time video, from one language to
another.
[6][7]
It supports over 100 languages at various levels
[3] and as of May 2013, serves over 200 million people daily.
[4]
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 automatically
identified.
[8]
If a user enters a
URL in the source text, Google Translate will produce a
hyperlink to a machine translation of the website.
[9]
For some languages, text can be entered via an
on-screen keyboard,
handwriting recognition, or
speech recognition.
[10][11]
Browser integration
Google Translate is available in some browsers as an extension which can run the translation engine.
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 Chrome
browser by default, for optional automatic webpage translation.
[14]
Mobile apps
The Google Translate app
[3] for
Android and
iOS
supports more than 90 languages and can translate 37 languages via
photo, 32 via voice in "conversation mode", and 27 via real-time video
in "augmented reality mode".
[15]
The Android app was released in January 2010, while an
HTML5 web application was released for iOS users in August 2008,
[16] followed by a native app on February 8, 2011.
[17]
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.
[18]
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.
In January 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.
[19] The speed and quality of real-time video translation (
augmented reality) feature were further enhanced in July 2015 with the release of a new implementation that utilizes
convolutional neural networks.
[20][21]
API
In May 2011, Google announced that the Google Translate
API for
software developers had been deprecated and would cease functioning.
[22]
The Translate API page stated the reason as "substantial economic
burden caused by extensive abuse" with an end date set for December 1,
2011.
[23] In response to public pressure, Google announced in June 2011 that the API would continue to be available as a paid service.
[24]
Because the API was used in numerous third-party websites and apps,
the original decision to deprecate it led some developers to criticize
Google and question the viability of using Google APIs in their
products.
[25][26]
Supported languages
The following languages are supported in Google Translate.
[27]
Languages in development
These languages are not yet supported by Google Translate, but are available in the Translate Community.
[28]
Method of translation
In April 2006, Google Translate launched with a statistical machine translation engine.
[1]
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.
[29] 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.
[30]
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 150-200 million words, and two monolingual corpora each of more than a billion words.
[29] 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.
[31] The UN typically publishes documents in all six
official UN languages, which has produced a very large 6-language corpus.
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).
[32]
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 as to what an appropriate translation should be.
[33]
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
Babel Fish (now defunct). Since October 2007, Google Translate has used proprietary, in-house technology based on
statistical machine translation instead.
[34][35]
Google Neural Machine Translation
In
September 2016, a research team at Google announced the development of
the Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT) to increase fluency
and accuracy in Google Translate
[2][5] and in November announced that Google Translate would switch to GNMT.
Google Translate's new
neural machine translation system uses a large
end-to-end artificial neural network capable of
deep learning.
[2][36] GNMT improves the quality of translation because it uses an
example based (EBMT)
machine translation method in which the system "learns from millions of examples."
[36]
It translates "whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by
piece. It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most
relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more
like a human speaking with proper grammar".
[2] GNMT's "proposed architecture" of "system learning" was first tested on over a hundred languages supported by Google Translate.
[36] With the end-to-end framework, "the system learns over time to create better, more natural translations."
[2] The GNMT network is capable of
interlingual machine translation, which encodes the "semantics of the sentence rather than simply memorizing phrase-to-phrase translations",
[36][37] and the system did not invent its own universal language, but uses "the commonality found inbetween many languages".
[38]
GNMT was first enabled for eight languages: to and from English and
Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and
Turkish.
[2][5]
GNMT is an improvement on Google Translate in that it is capable of
translating directly from one language to another (L1 → L2) instead
often first translating to English, for example, and then to the target
language (L1 → EN → L2).
[37]
The GNMT system is "capable of Zero-Shot Translation - translating
between a language pair (for example, Japanese to Korean) which the
"system has never explicitly seen before."
[36]
Previously, Google Translate translated to English and then to the
target language (L1 → EN → L2) not directly from one language to another
(L1 → L2).
[37]
Limitations
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.
[39]
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.
[39]
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 Google Translate 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 Island; 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.
[citation needed]
Open-source licenses and components
| Albanian |
Albanet |
CC-BY 3.0/GPL 3 |
| Arabic |
Arabic Wordnet |
CC-BY-SA 3 |
| Catalan |
Multilingual Central Repository |
CC-BY-3.0 |
| Chinese |
Chinese Wordnet |
Wordnet |
| Danish |
Dannet |
Wordnet |
| English |
Princeton Wordnet |
Wordnet |
| Finnish |
FinnWordnet |
Wordnet |
| French |
WOLF (WOrdnet Libre du Français) |
CeCILL-C |
| Galician |
Multilingual Central Repository |
CC-BY-3.0 |
| Hebrew |
Hebrew Wordnet |
Wordnet |
| Hindi |
IIT Bombay Wordnet |
Indo Wordnet |
| Indonesian |
Wordnet Bahasa |
MIT |
| Italian |
MultiWordnet |
CC-BY-3.0 |
| Japanese |
Japanese Wordnet |
Wordnet |
| Javanese |
Javanese Wordnet |
Wordnet |
| Malay |
Wordnet Bahasa |
MIT |
| Norwegian |
Norwegian Wordnet |
Wordnet |
| Persian |
Persian Wordnet |
Free to Use |
| Polish |
plWordnet |
Wordnet |
| Portuguese |
OpenWN-PT |
CC-BY-SA-3.0 |
| Spanish |
Multilingual Central Repository |
CC-BY-3.0 |
| Thai |
Thai Wordnet |
Wordnet |
Reviews
Shortly
after launching the translation service, Google won an international
competition for English–Arabic and English–Chinese machine translation.
[41]
Translation mistakes and oddities
Since
Google Translate uses statistical matching to translate, translated
text can often include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors,
[42] sometimes swapping common terms for similar but nonequivalent common terms in the other language,
[43] or inverting sentence meaning. Novelty websites like
Bad Translator
and Translation Party have utilized the service to produce humorous
text by translating back and forth between multiple languages, similar
to the children's game
Chinese whispers.
[44]
Translate
Community is a platform intended to improve the Google Translate
service. Volunteers can select up to five languages to help improve
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.
[45] In August 2016 the Google Crowdsource app was released, which also offered translation tasks.
[46]
See also
References
Type of site
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 Island; 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.[citation needed]Accent of English that the "text-to-speech" audio of Google Translate of each country usesBritish English (female)American English (female)Oceania accent (female)No Google translate service
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