HiW
March 2014
How it Works:
Google translate
translate.google.com
What is Google Translate?
Google Translate is a free translation service that provides instant translations between
dozens of different languages. It can translate words, sentences and web pages between
any combination of our supported languages. With Google Translate, Google targets to
make information universally accessible and useful, regardless of the language in which
it’s written.
So, How does it work?
When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of
millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting
patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators. Google
Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be.
This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called "statistical machine
translation". Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation are
perfect. The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyze in a
specific language, the better the translation quality will be. This is why translation
accuracy varies sometimes across languages.
Statistical Learning
At Google they feed the computer with
billions of words of text, both
monolingual text in the target
language, and aligned text consisting
of examples of human translations
between the languages. They then
apply statistical learning techniques to
build a translation model.
Howz all done
If you want to teach someone a new
language you might start by teaching
them vocabulary words and
grammatical rules that explain how to
construct sentences. A computer can
learn foreign language the same way ,
by referring to vocabulary and a set of
rules.
Set of Words
Once the computer finds a pattern, it can use this pattern to translate similar texts in
the future. When this process is repeated billions of times we end up with billions of
patterns and one very smart computer program. For some languages however we
have fewer translated documents available. Google Translate has been through 20
different stages of development, the most recent of which was introduced in June 2013 , which
allowed for the Romanization of Arabic text.
Techspirit | 10