How Accurate is Google Translate?
Many users ask this question after using Google Translate for the first time. They want to make sure it’s a reliable translation tool before they can brag that they can speak in another language (well, they can until someone proves otherwise).
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 only 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.
(Their explanation still seemed vague to me, but using my imagination seemed to help me understand what Google really means. 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, the translations 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.
Google Language Translator
Hola! Google tiene una gran característica.
In English, it means “Hello! Google has a great feature.”
No, I don’t speak Spanish at all. This translation was made possible by Google Translate. An online tool wherein one just has to input word/s for translation, this one is a state-of-the-art technology that company has come up with.
An in-house thing…
Google developed this translation software that uses a statistical translation system. It applies a translation model that is founded with billions of monolingual and aligned texts. It does not guarantee perfect translation but can be considered to ‘close to being perfect’ since the texts consist of human translation examples between the languages.
Various languages are covered. Even Arabic translator, Google has it. This great tool can translate to about 40 languages for now. Expect to be thrilled with more languages in the future.
Some of the languages include Bulgarian, Chinese both simplified and traditional, Danish, Filipino, Greek, Korean, Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician and many others.
If you are excited to use this tool visit http://www.google.com/language_tools or http://translate.google.com/translate_t# .
Use Google Translate in Your Language
If you want to translate Finnish, translate Romanian, or translate Dannish. The links you should go to are:
Finnish: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=fi#
Romanian: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=ro#
Dannish: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=da#
For other languages get the links at: Google Translator in Different Language Interfaces
Related Articles:
- How Accurate is Google Translate?
- Use Google Translate in Your Language
- Global Translator Plugin and Google Translator Widget
Google Translator: It Speaks COMMUNICATION!
The Internet is the whole world. You go to many places using the Internet. People from all over the world resort to the Internet for just about anything they need. If you run an Internet business, you deal with people from all over the world. The problem is you don’t speak their language.
You must have heard of Google many times. But did you know that Google can translate your website without any charge? Yes, it’s FREE.
The Google Translator is one of the many amazing services of this Internet giant, Google. You can get any phrase, paste it on Google Translator and in seconds you’ll have its translation to any language you prefer. It may not be the exact translation but you can be sure that it will be accurate. That will not matter anyway, as long as you get the message across.
You can try it out. It’s free anyway. If your website is in English. All you have to do is get the URL of that website and paste it on the form. In seconds, you’ll get the whole site translated to any language you prefer.
How will this help you? Remember, English is not the only language used on the Internet. Internet requires communication and that’s what Google Translator is for. If you want to make friends over the Internet, or have many customers from all over the world, it would be easy to communicate using the Google Translator. Remember, Google Translator speaks COMMUNICATION.
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