How Accurate is Google Translate?

December 10, 2008 by Reah Guevarra
Filed under: Translate, Translator 

Many users ask this question after using Google Translate for the first time. They want to make sure the tool is reliable.

Since only native speakers and professional translators can tell, their question most of the time is left unanswered.

Actually, there are instances that Google’s language translator can provide a translation as if a human translates it. There are also instances that it produces poor translation. Because of this translation flaw, users should just use this tool then to get an idea of what a foreign text could possibly mean in 41 languages (well 40 minus the language to be translated.

How Is Google Translate Different From Other Online Translation Tools?

Google Translate, in comparison to other language translation tool, is using a “statistical translation system for the language pairs” instead of the rule-based approach that “requires a lot of work to define grammar and vocabularies.”

What the company actually means with their technology is that they “feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model.” Google first got their linguistic data from United Nations’ documents that are normally available in six languages, and acquire more from other resources.

(Well, their explanation still seemed vague to me, but using my imagination seemed to help me understand what Google really mean. It’s like feeding their computers with text from a Bible that was written in English on the first column and in a different language on the right column.)

Can it Be Improved?

Despite the flaw of Google translator, it can be improved. The company is constantly working on its perfection, and even users can contribute if they see that a word or a text has been poorly translated by the computer. This can be done by native speakers who would like to test the accuracy of the tool, or by even those intermediate speaker. Both of them can easily identify a poorly translated part of the text since they have a good background of grammar rules, and idiomatic expressions.

So to contribute, all they have to do is expand the Suggest a Better Translation link. It will display a box where they can type their translation. After typing, they click the contribute button.

It may take time though for Google to update their database since they might still review what have been submitted, but at least everyone can help on improving the quality of thier language translator tool by suggesting a better translation.

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Comments

5 Comments on How Accurate is Google Translate?

  1.   Google Language Translator — Gfanatic on Wed, 10th Dec 2008 5:24 pm

    2. [...] How Accurate is Google Translate? [...]

  2. CJ on Fri, 12th Dec 2008 8:26 am

    3. I am a native French-English speaker and did machine translation for my thesis.

    I tested it:

    http://scienceforseo.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-translate-tried-and-tested.html

    You write a nice and complete summary – nice :)

  3. Taglish or Tagalog-English Texts in Google Translator « Your Maven on Wed, 11th Mar 2009 6:19 pm

    4. [...] you try those sentences I listed above in the near future, you may not see the Google Translate results I got from the day I used [...]

  4. Google Translates ‘I am sorry’ in 40 languages « tHenson on Sun, 22nd Mar 2009 6:08 pm

    5. [...] sentence ‘I am sorry ‘ anyway is common, so we should assume the translations here by Google Translate are close to the right [...]

  5. acky on Fri, 21st Aug 2009 5:43 pm

    6. Sa pamamagitan ng aking course at sa mga activities na aming ginagawa gaya ng mga router malaki ang maitutulong nito para sa aking kinabukasan at para makamit ang aking pinapangarap na makapagtapos ng pag aaral.

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