14 DAY TRIAL // Google Translate has been around for a while and it only aims to get better, beating out the competition in the process.
Franz Josef Och is a German researcher who has been working on perfecting a translation computer for a long time before being offered a job at Google. He is now one of the men behind the Machine Translation Google projects.
Over the years, he managed to expand Google Translate until it supported 71 languages from all over the world. The service is used quite frequently, with data showing that it was put to the test some 200 million times last year alone.
Of course, there are many areas Translate needs to improve in and that’s what Och hopes to achieve.
“I have trouble learning languages, and that’s precisely the beauty of machine translation: The most important thing is to be good at math and statistics, and to be able to program,” Och said for Der Spiegel.
As he notes, Translate correlates between existing translations and learning more or less on its own what to do with all this data. “In the end, we compute probabilities of translation,” he says.
This will not save your translations from being full of hilarious portions, but they say they’re working on improving a service that has long been doing better than similar tools offered by Microsoft, for instance.
The question Der Spiegel wanted to know the answer to is “what does Google intend to do with Translate?” Does it seek to achieve a monopoly on human communication?
Well, Och was pretty vague. “Machine translation makes a lot of information accessible for many people, and that makes many other things possible.”
Regardless of Google’s intentions, Translate has proven to be quite useful on many occasions, although it might not work perfectly every time or for every language combination.