How Electronic Language Translators Work HowStuffWorks

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.

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.

The Android app is compatible with devices running at least Android 2.1, while the iOS app is compatible with iPod Touches, iPads, and iPhones updated to iOS 7.0+. Google Translate is available in some web browsers as an optional downloadable extension that can run the translation engine, which allow right-click command access to the translation service. In February 2010, Google Translate was integrated into the Google Chrome browser by default, for optional automatic webpage translation. Something worth mentioning about this website is the context translations it offers. After performing a translation, just below the text, you’ll find a box of a few more examples of how that translation might look if the input text were slightly different.

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Translation mistakes and oddities

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.

That final information barrier collapsed when the Internet was commercialized in the 1990s. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency began throwing money around to develop translators for military use, the momentum finally shifted, and hand-held translators moved from the realm of science fiction to reality. When determining the best translation apps, we looked for features such as real-time voice translation, text translation, camera translation, and pronunciation guides.

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.

Translator – Azure Tutorial

In January 2010, Google introduced an Android app and iOS version in February 2011 to serve as a portable personal interpreter. As of February 2010, it was integrated into browsers such as Chrome and was able to pronounce the translated text, automatically recognize words in a picture and spot unfamiliar text and languages. As you may have been able to guess from its name, TextGrabber only allows you to translate text.

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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.

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.

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.