Ten years ago Google launched a little project out of their Google Research Labs with the simple goal of ” providing everyone with access to all the world’s information”. This project had the lofty aim of providing real-time natural language translation to anyone. At launch Google Translate could translate Arabic to English or English to Arabic.
Jump forward 10 years and we have the ability to translate 103 languages via text, real-time voice translation and image recognition. With Google Translate’s smartphones apps, we have near ubiquitous access to instantaneous translation. Just stop and appreciate what has been achieved with Google translate, if you’ve got a data connection – or have downloaded the language packs – you can communicate with almost anyone on the planet.
In their birthday blog post Google outlines some of Translate’s successes, here are a few highlights:
- 500 million active users
- The most common translations are between English and Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese and Indonesian
- Over 100 Billion words translated….. a day
- Over 3.5 million contrubitors have made 90 million submissions to the program
All that’s left to say is Bon anniversaire, feliz cumpleaños, fijne verjaardag, Otanjōbiomedetōgozaimasu, or more simply Happy Birthday Google Translate.
Do you use Google Translate? Let us know how it helps you communicate in the comments below.
