How Did Google Translate Evolve?

Translation Popular Tools

Google Translate is one of the most popular tools in the world for English translation (and many more), used by millions of people every single day. But how did Google Translate evolve from its first version, and how does it work? We’ll give you the whole scoop on Google Translate, from the history note to the present and all of its future potential, and dive into its deep learning.

Translation History: History of Google

Google Translate is based on artificial intelligence which runs on human intelligence and is a free, online tool that enables you to convert blocks of text between more than 80 languages. Created by Google in 2006, it quickly became one of their most popular products ever. Some people have even called it the best invention since sliced bread. Since then, Google has made a number of improvements to its translation algorithms and added new features—one example being interactive word and phrase definitions within your browser window.

Why Was It Created?

Translation software has existed for decades, but it has never been as simple to use or as accurate as it is today. This wasn’t an overnight accomplishment, though—in fact, it took millions of man-hours and hundreds of years of work to develop a system that’s so simple you could use it on your phone or can have a browser version. Google Translate overcame language barriers for people to be able to connect with one another regardless of their language. While translation tools have existed for quite some time, they were extremely complex and often required dedicated training in order to operate them effectively.

What Has Been Improved Since Then?

Although it might not provide relevant translation, Google Translate has improved significantly since then. It still gives the basic idea. For one thing, you can now translate text offline and even it has speech translation in real-time. It’s also gotten better at translating languages that aren’t part of Western Europe (it added more than 100 new languages in 2013), so if you speak anything from Punjabi to Urdu, chances are good you’ll be able to use its services.

Who Uses It and Why Do They Use It?

Since its inception, millions of people and billions of pages have been translated by Google. Though translation services existed before, none had gained such a large user base so quickly. Today, there are over 300 million users worldwide. People use it because it’s fast and easy to use with minimal effort required on their part. Just type the text or sentence translation box and it will translate from the foreign language (or from your native tongue) to the target language.

What Does the Future Hold for Google Translate?

It’s safe to say that we are in an age of technological advancement, where machines can be programmed to do things far better than humans ever could. Take translation programs, for example. In the past, if you wanted a document translated into another language, you had to send it over to a translation agency or work with a human translator. But now there’s Google Translate. The translation quality isn’t perfect – yet – but it does offer some very interesting benefits for businesses and individuals alike.

Apps for Language Conversion

Artificial language conversion is nowadays getting popular and there are many apps for language conversion available in the market, Google translate still remains at the top of the translate community.

Let’s look at these common translation of French sentence into English (target language):

nous allons à la fête (We are going to the party)

Another French sentence into English:

Elle aime cuisine (She likes to cook)

A Chinese phrase into English (target language):

欢迎来到这座城市 (Welcome to the city)

Chinese characters 我喜欢旅游 into English (I like to travel).

Approximations across languages are used to reflect a lack of exact knowledge which is usually observed in google translate. It might offer correct conversion of the common phrases but do not dive into deep learning techniques. It gives the foggiest idea of the complex sentences.

Google Translate Phrasebook

Sometimes google translates into confusing phrase and complex phrase that might not resonate with your destination language.

There’s one thing called Google Translate Phrasebook: Google Translate gives you a Phrasebook in which you can save translated words and phrases.

Though hundreds of millions of automatic translation tools are available and they have their own benefits still they can’t beat human intelligence. Human translators are always a better idea to go for especially for your document translation. Legal document translation has to be taken out by human translators only as they offer unlimited characters.

Today, we’re introducing the next step in making Google Translate even better: Google Neural Machine Translation.

Neural Machine Translation service has been generating exciting research results for a few years and in September, our researchers announced Google’s version of this technique. At a high level, the Neural system translates whole sentences at a time, rather than just character for character.