Google Translate


Google Translate is a free multilingual statistical and neural machine translation service developed by Google, to translate text and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an application programming interface that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications. As of , Google Translate supports languages at various levels and as of 2016, claimed over 500 million total users, with more than 100 billion words translated daily.
Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service, it used United Nations and European Parliament documents and transcripts to gather linguistic data. Rather than translating languages directly, it first translates text to English and then pivots to the target language in most of the language combinations it posits in its grid, with a few exceptions including Catalan-Spanish. During a translation, it looks for patterns in millions of documents to help decide on which words to choose and how to arrange them in the target language. Its accuracy, which has been criticized and ridiculed on several occasions, has been measured to vary greatly across languages. In November 2016, Google announced that Google Translate would switch to a neural machine translation engine - Google Neural Machine Translation - 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". Originally only enabled for a few languages in 2016, GNMT is used in all languages in the Google Translate roster as of, except for Kyrgyz, Latin, and the Belarusian, Maltese and Sundanese to other languages pairs.

History

Google Translate is a complementary translation service developed by Google in April 2006. It translates multiple forms of texts and media such as words, phrases and webpages.
Originally Google Translate was released as a statistical machine translation service. Translating the required text into English before translating into the selected language was a mandatory step that it had to take. Since SMT uses predictive algorithms to translate text, it had poor grammatical accuracy. However, Google initially did not hire experts to resolve this limitation due to the ever-evolving nature of language.
In January 2010, Google has introduced an Android app and iOS version in February 2011 to serve as a portable personal interpreter. As of February 2010, it was integrated into browsers such as Chrome and was able to pronounce the text, automatically recognize words in the picture and spot unfamiliar text and languages.
In May 2014, Google acquired Word Lens to improve the quality of visual and voice translation. It is able to scan text or a picture with one's device and have it translated instantly. Moreover, the system automatically identifies foreign languages and translates speech without requiring individuals to tap the microphone button whenever speech translation is needed.
In November 2016, Google transitioned its translating method to a system called neural machine translation. It uses deep learning techniques to translate whole sentences at a time, which it has measured to be more accurate between English and French, German, Spanish, and Chinese. No measurement results have been provided by Google researchers for GNMT from English to other languages, other languages to English, or between language pairs that do not include English.
As of 2018, it translates more than 100 billion words a day.

Functions

Google Translate can translate multiple forms of text and media, which includes text, speech, and text within still or moving images. Specifically, its functions include:
For most of its features, Google Translate provides the pronunciation, dictionary, and listening to translation. Additionally, Google Translate has introduced its own Translate app, so translation is available with a mobile phone in offline mode.

Features

Google Translate produces approximations across languages of multiple forms of text and media, including text, speech, websites, or text on display in still or live video images. For some languages, Google Translate can synthesize speech from text, and in certain pairs it is possible to highlight specific corresponding words and phrases between the source and target text. Results are sometimes shown with dictional information below the translation box, but it is not a dictionary and has been shown to invent translations in all languages for words it does not recognize. If "Detect language" is selected, text in an unknown language can be automatically identified. In the web interface, users can suggest alternate translations, such as for technical terms, or correct mistakes. These suggestions may be 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. Users can save translation proposals in a "phrasebook" for later use. For some languages, text can be entered via an on-screen keyboard, through handwriting recognition, or speech recognition. 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.
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.
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 accent is used, except for a special General Australian accent used in Australia, New Zealand and Norfolk Island, and an Indian English accent used in India; for Spanish, in the Americas, a Latin American accent is used, while in the other parts of the world, a Castilian accent is used; Portuguese uses a São Paulo accent around the world, except in Portugal, where their native accent is used; In Canada, a Quebecois accent is used for French, elsewhere, a standard European accent is used; Bengali uses a male Bangladeshi accent internationally, but it has a special female Indian Bengali accent used exclusively in India. 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.

Browser integration

Google Translate is available in some web browsers as an optional downloadable extension that can run the translation engine, which allow right-click command access to the translation service. In February 2010, Google Translate was integrated into the Google Chrome browser by default, for optional automatic webpage translation.

Mobile app

The Google Translate app for Android and iOS supports languages and can propose translations for 37 languages via photo, 32 via voice in "conversation mode", and 27 via live video imagery in "augmented reality mode".
The Android app was released in January 2010, while an HTML5 web application was released for iOS users in August 2008, followed by a native app on February 8, 2011.
The application supports 103 languages and voice input for 45 languages. It is available for devices running Android 2.1 and above and can be downloaded by searching for "Google Translate" in Google Play.
The current Google Translate app is compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch updated to iOS 7.0+. 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.
A January 2011 Android version experimented with a "Conversation Mode" that aims to allow users to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language. Originally limited to English and Spanish, the feature received support for 12 new languages, still in testing, the following October.
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 technology and gives the translation. Camera input is not available for all languages.
In January 2015, the apps gained the ability to propose translations of physical signs in real time using the device's camera, as a result of Google's acquisition of the Word Lens app. The original January launch only supported seven languages, but a July update added support for 20 new languages, with the release of a new implementation that utilizes convolutional neural networks, and also enhanced the speed and quality of Conversation Mode translations. The feature was subsequently renamed Instant Camera. The technology underlying Instant Camera combines image processing and optical character recognition, then attempts to produce cross-language equivalents using standard Google Translate estimations for the text as it is perceived.
On May 11, 2016, Google introduced Tap to Translate for Google Translate for Android. Upon highlighting text in an app that is in a foreign language, Translate will pop up inside of the app and offer translations.

API

On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the Google Translate API for software developers had been deprecated and would cease functioning. The Translate API page stated the reason as "substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse" with an end date set for December 1, 2011. In response to public pressure, Google announced in June 2011 that the API would continue to be available as a paid service.
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.

Google Assistant

Google Translate also provides translations for Google Assistant and the devices that Google Assistant runs on such as Google Home and Pixel Buds.

Supported languages

The following 109 languages are supported by Google Translate as of . Note: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese refer to two different writing systems for the same language, so the actual total number of languages in the roster is 108.
  1. Afrikaans
  2. Albanian
  3. Amharic
  4. Arabic
  5. Armenian
  6. Azerbaijani
  7. Basque
  8. Belarusian
  9. Bengali
  10. Bosnian
  11. Bulgarian
  12. Burmese
  13. Catalan
  14. Cebuano
  15. Chewa
  16. Chinese *
  17. Chinese *
  18. Corsican
  19. Croatian
  20. Czech
  21. Danish
  22. Dutch
  23. English
  24. Esperanto
  25. Estonian
  26. Filipino
  27. Finnish
  28. French
  29. Galician
  30. Georgian
  31. German
  32. Greek
  33. Gujarati
  34. Haitian Creole
  35. Hausa
  36. Hawaiian
  37. Hebrew
  38. Hindi
  39. Hmong
  40. Hungarian
  41. Icelandic
  42. Igbo
  43. Indonesian
  44. Irish
  45. Italian
  46. Japanese
  47. Javanese
  48. Kannada
  49. Kazakh
  50. Khmer
  51. Kinyarwanda
  52. Korean
  53. Kurdish
  54. Kyrgyz
  55. Lao
  56. Latin
  57. Latvian
  58. Lithuanian
  59. Luxembourgish
  60. Macedonian
  61. Malagasy
  62. Malay
  63. Malayalam
  64. Maltese
  65. Maori
  66. Marathi
  67. Mongolian
  68. Nepali
  69. Norwegian
  70. Odia
  71. Pashto
  72. Persian
  73. Polish
  74. Portuguese
  75. Punjabi
  76. Romanian
  77. Russian
  78. Samoan
  79. Scots Gaelic
  80. Serbian
  81. Sesotho
  82. Shona
  83. Sindhi
  84. Sinhala
  85. Slovak
  86. Slovenian
  87. Somali
  88. Spanish
  89. Sundanese
  90. Swahili
  91. Swedish
  92. Tajik
  93. Tamil
  94. Tatar
  95. Telugu
  96. Thai
  97. Turkish
  98. Turkmen
  99. Ukrainian
  100. Urdu
  101. Uyghur
  102. Uzbek
  103. Vietnamese
  104. Welsh
  105. West Frisian
  106. Xhosa
  107. Yiddish
  108. Yoruba
  109. Zulu
  110. 1st stage
  111. #English to and from French
  112. #English to and from German
  113. #English to and from Spanish
  114. 2nd stage
  115. #English to and from Portuguese
  116. 3rd stage
  117. #English to and from Italian
  118. 4th stage
  119. #English to and from Chinese
  120. #English to and from Japanese
  121. #English to and from Korean
  122. 5th stage
  123. #English to and from Arabic
  124. 6th stage
  125. #English to and from Russian
  126. 7th stage
  127. #English to and from Chinese
  128. #Chinese
  129. 8th stage
  130. #English to and from Dutch
  131. #English to and from Greek
  132. 9th stage
  133. #English to and from Hindi
  134. 10th stage
  135. #Bulgarian
  136. #Croatian
  137. #Czech
  138. #Danish
  139. #Finnish
  140. #Norwegian
  141. #Polish
  142. #Romanian
  143. #Swedish
  144. 11th stage
  145. #Catalan
  146. #Filipino
  147. #Hebrew
  148. #Indonesian
  149. #Latvian
  150. #Lithuanian
  151. #Serbian
  152. #Slovak
  153. #Slovene
  154. #Ukrainian
  155. #Vietnamese
  156. 12th stage
  157. #Albanian
  158. #Estonian
  159. #Galician
  160. #Hungarian
  161. #Maltese
  162. #Thai
  163. #Turkish
  164. 13th stage
  165. #Persian
  166. 14th stage
  167. #Afrikaans
  168. #Belarusian
  169. #Icelandic
  170. #Irish
  171. #Macedonian
  172. #Malay
  173. #Swahili
  174. #Welsh
  175. #Yiddish
  176. 15th stage
  177. #The Beta stage is finished. Users can now choose to have the romanization written for Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Thai and Ukrainian. For translations from Arabic, Hindi and Persian, the user can enter a Latin transliteration of the text and the text will be transliterated to the native script for these languages as the user is typing. The text can now be read by a text-to-speech program in English, French, German and Italian.
  178. 16th stage
  179. #Haitian Creole
  180. 17th stage
  181. #Speech program launched in Hindi and Spanish.
  182. 18th stage
  183. #Speech program launched in Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh
  184. 19th stage
  185. #Armenian
  186. #Azerbaijani
  187. #Basque
  188. #Georgian
  189. #Urdu
  190. 20th stage
  191. #Provides romanization for Arabic.
  192. 21st stage
  193. #Allows phonetic typing for Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Serbian and Urdu.
  194. #Latin
  195. 22nd stage
  196. #Romanization of Arabic removed.
  197. #Spell check added.
  198. #For some languages, Google replaced text-to-speech synthesizers from eSpeak's robot voice to native speaker's nature voice technologies made by SVOX, and also the old versions of French, German, Italian and Spanish; Latin uses the same synthesizer as Italian.
  199. #Speech program launched in Arabic, Japanese and Korean.
  200. 23rd stage
  201. #Choice of different translations for a word.
  202. 24th stage
  203. #5 new Indic languages and a transliterated input method:
  204. #Bengali
  205. #Gujarati
  206. #Kannada
  207. #Tamil
  208. #Telugu
  209. 25th stage
  210. #Translation rating introduced.
  211. 26th stage
  212. #Dutch male voice synthesizer replaced with female.
  213. #Elena by SVOX replaced the Slovak eSpeak voice.
  214. #Transliteration of Yiddish added.
  215. 27th stage
  216. #Speech program launched in Thai.
  217. #Esperanto
  218. 28th stage
  219. #Lao
  220. 29th stage
  221. #Transliteration of Lao added.
  222. 30th stage
  223. #New speech program launched in English.
  224. 31st stage
  225. #New speech program in French, German, Italian, Latin and Spanish.
  226. 32nd stage
  227. #Phrasebook added.
  228. 33rd stage
  229. #Khmer
  230. 34th stage
  231. #Bosnian
  232. #Cebuano
  233. #Hmong
  234. #Javanese
  235. #Marathi
  236. 35th stage
  237. #16 additional languages can be used with camera-input: Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish.
  238. 36th stage
  239. #Hausa
  240. #Igbo
  241. #Maori
  242. #Mongolian
  243. #Nepali
  244. #Punjabi
  245. #Somali
  246. #Yoruba
  247. #Zulu
  248. 37th stage
  249. #Definition of words added.
  250. 38th stage
  251. #Burmese
  252. #Chewa
  253. #Kazakh
  254. #Malagasy
  255. #Malayalam
  256. #Sinhalese
  257. #Sotho
  258. #Sundanese
  259. #Tajik
  260. #Uzbek
  261. 39th stage
  262. #Transliteration of Arabic restored.
  263. 40th stage
  264. #Aurebesh
  265. 41st stage
  266. #Aurebesh removed.
  267. #Speech program launched in Bengali.
  268. #Amharic
  269. #Corsican
  270. #Hawaiian
  271. #Kurdish
  272. #Kyrgyz
  273. #Luxembourgish
  274. #Pashto
  275. #Samoan
  276. #Scottish Gaelic
  277. #Shona
  278. #Sindhi
  279. #West Frisian
  280. #Xhosa
  281. 42nd stage
  282. #Speech program launched in Ukrainian.
  283. 43rd stage
  284. #Speech program launched in Khmer and Sinhala.
  285. 44th stage
  286. #Speech program launched in Burmese, Malayalam, Marathi and Telugu.
  287. 45th stage
  288. #Speech program launched in Gujarati, Kannada, and Urdu.
  289. 46th stage
  290. #Kinyarwanda
  291. #Odia
  292. #Tatar
  293. #Turkmen
  294. #Uyghur

    Languages in development

These languages are not yet supported by Google Translate, but are available in the Translate Community.
  1. Assamese
  2. Cantonese
  3. Cherokee
  4. Dzongkha
  5. Guarani
  6. Kurdish
  7. Romansh
  8. Sicilian
  9. Tamazight
  10. Tibetan
  11. Wolof

    Translation methodology

In April 2006, Google Translate launched with a statistical machine translation engine.
Google Translate does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical or pattern 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. Original versions of Google Translate were 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.
Google Translate does not translate from one language to another. Instead, it often translates first to English and then to the target language. 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. 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 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 of more than 150-200 million words, and two monolingual corpora each of more than a billion words. 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 and European Parliament documents and transcripts. The UN typically publishes documents in all six official UN languages, which has produced a very large 6-language corpus.
When Google Translate generates a translation proposal, 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 informed guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be.
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. From October 2007, Google Translate used proprietary, in-house technology based on statistical machine translation instead, before transitioning to neural machine translation.

Google Translate Community

Google has crowdsourcing features for volunteers to be a part of its “Translate Community”, intended to help improve Google Translate's accuracy. In August 2016, a Google Crowdsource app was released for Android users, in which translation tasks are offered. There are three ways to contribute. First, Google will show a phrase that one should type in the translated version. Second, Google will show a proposed translation for a user to agree, disagree, or skip. Third, users can suggest translations for phrases where they think they can improve on Google's results. Tests in 44 languages show that the "suggest an edit" feature led to an improvement in a maximum of 40% of cases over four years, while analysis across the board shows that Google's crowd procedures often lock in erroneous translations.

Statistical machine translation

Although, Google deployed a new system called neural machine translation for better quality translation, there are languages that still use the traditional translation method called statistical machine translation. It is a rule-based translation method that utilizes predictive algorithms to guess ways to translate texts in foreign languages. It aims to translate whole phrases rather than single words then gather overlapping phrases for translation. Moreover, it also analyzes bilingual text corpora to generate statistical model that translates texts from one language to another.

Google Neural Machine Translation

In September 2016, a research team at Google led by the software engineer Harold Gilchrist announced the development of the Google Neural Machine Translation system to increase fluency and accuracy in Google Translate and in November announced that Google Translate would switch to GNMT.
Google Translate's neural machine translation system uses a large end-to-end artificial neural network that attempts to perform deep learning, in particular, long short-term memory networks.
GNMT improves the quality of translation over SMT in some instances because it uses an example-based machine translation method in which the system "learns from millions of examples." According to Google researchers, 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". GNMT's "proposed architecture" of "system learning" has been implemented on over a hundred languages supported by Google Translate. With the end-to-end framework, Google states but does not demonstrate for most languages that "the system learns over time to create better, more natural translations." The GNMT network attempts interlingual machine translation, which encodes the "semantics of the sentence rather than simply memorizing phrase-to-phrase translations", and the system did not invent its own universal language, but uses "the commonality found in between many languages". GNMT was first enabled for eight languages: to and from English and Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. In March 2017, it was enabled for Hindi, Russian and Vietnamese, followed by Bengali, Gujarati, Indonesian, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu in April.

Accuracy

Google Translate is not as reliable as human translation. When text is well-structured, written using formal language, with simple sentences, relating to formal topics for which training data is ample, it often produces conversions similar to human translations between English and a number of high-resource languages. Accuracy decreases for those languages when fewer of those conditions apply, for example when sentence length increases or the text uses familiar or literary language. For many other languages vis-à-vis English, it can produce the gist of text in those formal circumstances. Human evaluation from English to all 102 languages shows that the main idea of a text is conveyed more than 50% of the time for 35 languages. For 67 languages, a minimally comprehensible result is not achieved 50% of the time or greater. A few studies have evaluated Chinese, French, German, and Spanish to English, but no systematic human evaluation has been conducted from most Google Translate languages to English. Speculative language-to-language scores extrapolated from English-to-other measurements indicate that Google Translate will produce translation results that convey the gist of a text from one language to another more than half the time in about 1% of language pairs, where neither language is English.
When used as a dictionary to translate single words, Google Translate is highly inaccurate because it must guess between polysemic words. Among the top 100 words in the English language, which make up more than 50% of all written English, the average word has more than 15 senses, which makes the odds against a correct translation about 15 to 1 if each sense maps to a different word in the target language. Most common English words have at least two senses, which produces 50/50 odds in the likely case that the target language uses different words for those different senses. The odds are similar from other languages to English. Google Translate makes statistical guesses that raise the likelihood of producing the most frequent sense of a word, with the consequence that an accurate translation will be unobtainable in cases that do not match the majority or plurality corpus occurrence. The accuracy of single-word predictions has not been measured for any language. Because almost all non-English language pairs pivot through English, the odds against obtaining accurate single-word translations from one non-English language to another can be estimated by multiplying the number of senses in the source language with the number of senses each of those terms have in English. When Google Translate does not have a word in its vocabulary, it makes up a result as part of its algorithm.

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 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 aspects in Romance languages so habitual and continuous acts in the past often become single historical events. Although seemingly pedantic, this can often lead to incorrect results which would have been avoided by a human translator. Knowledge of the subjunctive mood is virtually non-existent. Moreover, the formal second person is often chosen, whatever the context or accepted usage. Since its English reference material contains only "you" forms, it has difficulty translating a language with "you all" or formal "you" variations.
Due to differences between languages in investment, research, and the extent of digital resources, the accuracy of Google Translate varies greatly among languages. Some languages produce better results than others. Most languages from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, tend to score poorly in relation to the scores of many well-financed European languages, with Afrikaans and Chinese being the high-scoring exceptions from their continents. No languages indigenous to Australia or the Americas are included within Google Translate. Higher scores for European can be partially attributed to the Europarl Corpus, a trove of documents from the European Parliament that have been professionally translated by the mandate of the European Union into as many as 21 languages. A 2010 analysis indicated that French to English translation is relatively accurate, and 2011 and 2012 analyses showed that Italian to English translation is relatively accurate as well. 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 cannot edit sentences as a whole. Instead, one must edit sometimes arbitrary sets of characters, leading to incorrect edits. A good example is Russian-to-English. Formerly one would use Google Translate to make a draft and then use a dictionary and common sense to correct the numerous mistakes. As of early 2018 Translate is sufficiently accurate to make the Russian Wikipedia accessible to those who can read English. The quality of Translate can be checked by adding it as an extension to Chrome or Firefox and applying it to the left language links of any Wikipedia article. It can be used as a dictionary by typing in words. One can translate from a book by using a scanner and an OCR like Google Drive, but this takes about five minutes per page.
In its Written Words Translation function, there is a word limit on the amount of text that can be translated at once. Therefore, long text should be transferred to a document form and translated through its Document Translate function.
Moreover, like all machine translation programs, Google Translate struggles with polysemy and multiword expressions. A word in a foreign language might have two different meanings in the translated language. This might lead to mistranslations.
Additionally, grammatical errors remain a major limitation to the accuracy of Google Translate.

Open-source licenses and components

Reviews

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

Translation mistakes and oddities

Since Google Translate used statistical matching to translate, translated text can often include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors, sometimes swapping common terms for similar but nonequivalent common terms in the other language, 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 telephone.
If the app tries to translate Monty Python's "The Funniest Joke in the World" into English, the service returns the message "".

Court usage

In 2017, Google Translate was used during a court hearing when court officials at Teesside Magistrates' Court failed to book an interpreter for the Chinese defendant.