Google Translate System

Google Translate is a free multilingual machine translation service developed by Google, to translate text. It offers a website interface, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications. Google Translate supports over 100 languages at various levels and as of May 2017, serves over 500 million people daily.

Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service, it used the United Nations and European Parliament transcripts to gather linguistic data. Rather than translating languages directly, it first translates text to English and then to the target language. During a translation, it looks for patterns in millions of documents to help decide on the best translation. Its accuracy has been criticized and ridiculed on several occasions. In November 2016, Google announced that Google Translate would switch to a neural machine translation engine – Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) – 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 being more like a human speaking with proper grammar”. Originally only enabled for a few languages in 2016, GNMT is gradually being used for more languages.

Google Translate has been used by many artists such as Malinda Kathleen Reese to create parodies of songs which have become enormously popular since2006 when the program was launched.