14 DAY TRIAL // Google Translate is as much part of the web as is Google Search at this point. There's hardly anyone who hasn't relied on it at least occasionally. And there's no one who hasn't laughed or been baffled by some of the things Translate spills out.
But it's easy to forget that tools like Google Translate weren't even possible only a few years ago and may have seemed science fiction only a decade ago.
Yet today, you can speak something into your phone in your language and have it translate and speak it for you in a language of your choice, from the 64 languages Google Translate currently provides.
Perhaps the most surprising part is that it all started six years ago with a system that only supported a couple of languages.
"We announced our statistical MT approach on April 28, 2006, and in the six years since then we’ve focused primarily on core translation quality and language coverage," Franz Och, distinguished research scientist for Google Translate, wrote.
"We can now translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish, even Esperanto," he added.
Today, more than 200 million people visit the Google Translate website every month looking for help. And Translate is built into plenty of other places, Google Chrome, Android phones, even YouTube where it translates close captions.
In a single day, Google's system translates the equivalent of one million books. That's about how much all of the professional translators in the world churn out in a year.
Unsurprisingly, Google believes that, at this point, the vast majority of translation that is done on this planet is made via Translate. The system isn't perfect and there will always be room for human translators Google says, but we'll see about that in a decade or two.