Users now have more alternatives to pick from, so they can choose the perfect translation

Nov 1, 2012 10:24 GMT  ·  By

Google Translate is not perfect. Everyone knows this, including Google. It's getting better, but it still does stupid, by our standards, mistakes.

Now, Google is acknowledging that even more and is using the strengths of machine learning translations to provide people with better results.

Google introduced several changes all of which have the same goal, give users more power and more info to choose the right translation when the automated method isn't exactly right.

By default, Google has countless various translations for the same word and phrases. It chooses the best ones to illustrate depending on various conditions. But it doesn't get it right.

Google is now providing more alternate translations so you can pick the closest one to what you want to say or what the text you're translating means to say.

For example, Google Translate now includes reverse translations which are exactly what they sound like.

Any word you translate will get several alternatives, each translated back into the original language so you can pick the one that fits exactly what you're trying to express.

"Reverse translations can distinguish translations of different meanings and reveal subtle differences among similar words. Each translation is now annotated with its most frequent reverse translations," Google explained.

Next to these alternative translations, you'll also notice a frequency bar which, as you can imagine, shows how frequently that particular translation is used. The rarest translations are not displayed by default, but you can uncover those too if you want.

"The French novelist Gustave Flaubert was known to spend hours on end in pursuit of le mot juste—the perfect word. At Google, we prefer to deliver results in an instant, ranked in order of relevance," Google added.

"Frequency indicators now mark each translation as common, uncommon, or rare, based on the vast number of translations we use to train our system," it said.

Finally, Google Translate now groups synonyms together so the list of alternative translations is clearer and more concise.

All of this is only available for English translations, but Google is working on introducing the features to more of the supported languages. Google Translate has 65 officially supported languages at this point.