Inside Google Translate: Stakes and Opportunities for the Users

Several among you have now more or less habit to use Google Translate to translate your documents, web page or words. That is good, but as far as we concern, it is also important to find out how Google Translate works, in the goal to improve your experience.

First Google Translate is a free translation service that aims to provide instant translations between more or less 64 different languages.

In fact according to Google: ‘’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 will be perfect. The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyse in a specific language, the better the translation quality will be. This is why translation accuracy will sometimes vary across language.’’