After all, with access to so much multilingual content, Google Translate could surely “learn” fast enough to outdo any human translator.

With so great a postulate, the days of human translations were to be counted, surely. And putting it into appropriate grammar structures and sequences. Translating meaning, not individual words. Which is basically how a human brain translates. Instead, it uses an AI-powered neural machine translation algorithm that fetches the meaning from a broader context.Īnd instead of mirroring the source text’s word sequence, it tries to mimic the target language’s grammar and syntax rules. It doesn’t translate individual words anymore. The new artillery operates on a wholly different level. We wonder who that might resemble… How Google Translate Works Todayįast-forward ten years and Google decides to uproot its computing entirely, introducing Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT). And so a German-to-English translation went something like: (Remember, german students: the verb always goes at the end). With a statistical model, Google had no way of understanding how to turn the sentence structure around. Truth be told, the most significant problems came up when translating languages with utterly different word order.

This is just an analogy for all the #googlefails memes that swarmed the internet. Simply put, it meant that Google translated meaning on a word level. But the translation algorithm was built on a statistical model. At the time, it was based on zillions of human translations made by the European Parliament and the United Nations. Google launched its automated translation tool back in 2006. What is Google Translate, and how does it work? The results are rather interesting.īut let’s start with some background first. We gave Google Translate a spin with four languages and assessed the accuracy of their translations into English: Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian. So, how accurate is Google Translate today?Īnd who better to assess its accuracy than a leading translation services provider? But whoever uses the automated translation tool can tell you that it still has its glitches and faults. Google Translate has come a long way since its #googlefail days of yore.

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