How Electronic Language Translators Work HowStuffWorks

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. The Android app was released in January 2010, and for iOS on February 8, 2011, after an HTML5 web application was released for iOS users in August 2008.

Current statusActiveGoogle Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, as well as an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications.

It’s really helpful for one-time lookups, but is also nice to use for learning a new language. When you translate a website, position the foreign page right next to the one in your language so that you can learn which words are being translated to what, and the translations even continue as you click through the site. Another translator Microsoft has is called Conversations, and it’s by far one of the coolest ones available.

Texts written in the Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari and Greek scripts can be transliterated automatically from phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet. The browser version of Google Translate provides the option to show phonetic equivalents of text translated from Japanese to English. As the name would suggest, Internet Slang Translator is more for fun, not practical use. Just type some words you want to be converted into slang, or enter internet slang to translate it to proper English.

Like Google Translate, Reverso translates between languages automatically and supports several of the more common languages. If you’re using the image translator, zoom way up if you have to, to see tiny text. Swapping to a different language during the translation doesn’t force you to re-upload the image, which is great. The Translate Community verifies translations to help make the service more accurate.

How to Become a Professional Translator in 7 Detailed Steps

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 has been 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.

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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.

The American Translator’s Association also offers programs to certify you as a translator. If you are a specialist in legal translation, you can get certified by the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators. Aside from being proficient in at least two languages, you should take translation studies to become a translator. A high school graduate can take courses on writing and comprehension, and foreign languages. You need fluency in the source language or the language you would be translating from. You must be a native speaker of the target language or the language you would be translating into.

When used as a dictionary to translate single words, Google Translate is highly inaccurate because it must guess between polysemic words. 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 accuracy of single-word predictions has not been measured for any language. When Google Translate does not have a word in its vocabulary, it makes up a result as part of its algorithm. 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.

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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. Research conducted in 2011 showed that Google Translate got a slightly higher score than the UCLA minimum score for the English Proficiency Exam. Moreover, a number of languages are translated into a sentence structure and sentence length similar to a human translation. Furthermore, Google carried out a test that required native speakers of each language to rate the translation on a scale between 0 and 6, and Google Translate scored 5.43 on average.