Google Translate is just one of the way that technology can break down barriers and help people reach out across the world. Since its introduction 10 years ago, Google Translate has grown from a handful of supported languages to 103. Through the app and web portal you can now communicate with people across the globe like never before.
What’s next for Google Translate? Cloud computing with a touch of Machine Learning, of course. Google today announced Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is here, the new MI-based translation approach goes beyond word recognition and starts to move translation into both full sentence translation and more human-like understanding of the actual intent rather than the individual words of a message.
Starting today, Google translate will now do two-way translation of English and French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish using the new NMT. With just these 8 languages Google can apparently address 1/3 of the world’s population and enhance 35% of all Google translate queries.
As you can see in the above example, the new NMT moves beyond simple word translation and reconstructs a translated sentence into something far more comprehensible. While launching with only 8 languages, Google plans to update all 103 languages to the NMT system in the coming years. Whenever you use Google search or the translate app or web interface with the 8 languages you’ll now be getting the NMT translations.
But wait, there’s more Google is opening up access to NMT via their Cloud translation API. Developers will be able to harness the power of Google’s latest translation technology within their own apps. Like most Cloud APIs, access isn’t free, but what in life is?
Are you a Google translate user? Are you looking forward to better text recognition? Let us know below.
