14 DAY TRIAL // The number of languages on Google's translation services has grown to no less than 41, following the introduction of seven new items to the list the past week. Users can now also perform automatic machine translations involving Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician. The addition of the new languages means that Google Translate, a service still in Beta, now covers almost all the inhabitants of Earth, when it comes to helping them break down linguistic barriers.
“The rollout of these seven additional languages marks a new milestone: automatic translations between 41 languages (1,640 language pairs!). This means we can now translate between languages read by 98% of Internet users,” revealed Jeff Chin, Google product manager. “In just a few years, the machine translation group within Google Research has taken its initial research system from two languages to 41 languages and is now handling millions of translation requests a day.”
Chin applauded the fact that when it comes down to a selection of languages, Google Translate is the first service allowing users to perform machine translations, besting rivals such as Microsoft, which offers Windows Live translator. Still, neither Google nor its rivals have managed to overcome the most critical aspect of the machine translations, related to the impossibility to automatically translate “semantics.” Still, a basic level of translation, sufficient for the end user to understand information in a completely different language is possible. And as the technology evolves, machine translation systems are bound to also go beyond simply finding equivalents for words in different languages.
“Of course, there's always room for improvement, and we're working hard to improve translation quality. Our statistical models are built from vast quantities of monolingual and translated texts using automated machine learning techniques. It's exciting and satisfying to work on a product that can help people access content they may otherwise be unable to understand,” Chin added.