What is Google Translate and Its History

Google Translate: The Translation Technology that Changed the World

What is Google Translate?

Google Translate is a web-based translation service developed by Google. It allows users to automatically translate texts, documents, websites and conversations between languages. Launched in April 2006, Google Translate has rapidly grown to become one of the most popular translation tools in the world, supporting more than 100 languages and serving billions of translation requests every day.

History and Development of Google Translate

Google Translate originally used a statistical-based translation system known as Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). In the early days of its development, Google Translate analyzed large amounts of text from various sources, such as official UN documents, human-translated text, and other language data. From this analysis, the SMT system tried to recognize patterns in text pairs between languages and used these patterns to generate translations.
However, the SMT approach has many limitations. The resulting translations are often inaccurate, especially when dealing with complex contexts or language idioms. This is because SMT relies solely on statistics and does not understand the context or meaning of the sentence. The quality of translation also varies, depending on the availability of parallel data between the source and target languages.

In 2016, Google changed their translation approach by introducing Neural Machine Translation (NMT). This system is more sophisticated and capable of producing more accurate translations by taking into account the context of the entire sentence, not just phrases or words. With NMT, Google Translate is able to understand deeper nuances and meanings, resulting in much better translation quality compared to the previous SMT approach.