![]() The new GNMT approach also allows for “zero-shot translation”, which means that Google Translate can translate directly between languages rather than relying on English as an intermediary.įor example, it can go straight from Spanish to German, rather than Spanish → English → German. Here’s an image comparing human translation vs GNMT vs Google’s older approach (PBMT) ( these results are from 2016):Īnd here’s an example of a sentence translated using the different methods: In fact, Google claims that this approach “reduce translation errors by more than 55%-85% on several major language pairs”. Rather than translating sentences word-by-word (or phrase-by-phrase) like the old system, the GNMT approach translates the meaning of entire sentences at a time.īy looking at the meaning of the sentence as a whole rather than just the individual words, Google Translate is able to generate more accurate, natural-sounding translations. There are a lot of technical details behind the scenes of how GNMT works. In late 2016, Google Translate moved to a new machine learning system called Google Neural Machine Translation, or GNMT for short. The New Google Translate Approach (After 2016) ![]() Google Translate ditched this old system in 2016, though, opting for a new algorithm that opened the door for much better accuracy. This extra step in the middle provided further opportunities for issues to arise and added to the “robotic” feel of some translations. Then it translated the English version of the Spanish text into German.First, it translated the Spanish text into English.While you may have selected just those two languages, here’s how Google Translate actually worked on the backend: This is why pre-2016 translations often felt robotic and didn’t sound natural.Īnother issue is that this old system relied on using English as an intermediary for each translation.įor example, let’s say you translated text from Spanish to German. Instead, it essentially translated word-for-word. While that approach was ok for single words or short phrases, it caused a lot of issues with longer, more complex sentences because Google Translate wasn’t able to accurately assess the context of the sentence as a whole. This model is called statistical machine translation, or SMT for short. ![]() If needed, Google Translate repeated this for each word/phrase in the translation text to fully translate the content.Google Translate detected the most frequently used version of the word or phrase from the text and supplied that as the translation for that word/phrase. ![]() Google Translate searched its huge database to find human-translated documents in the selected language pair.In the past, Google Translate used a fairly simple translation model, which is why its accuracy struggled in the past. The Old Google Translate Approach (Before 2016) Well, the evolution of the way that Google Translate performs its translations will actually give you some insight into its accuracy and why Google Translate has gotten a lot better since late 2016.īeyond the backend translation, it’s also important to understand the different options that you, as a user, have for using Google Translate. Why is this important when we’re talking about Google Translate accuracy? How Does Google Translate Work?īefore we talk about how reliable Google Translate is, let’s quickly run over some basic details on how Google Translate actually works behind the scenes. Want more details about Google Translate accuracy? Keep reading our full post to learn all of the gory details. However, there are tradeoffs with that alternative, which is why Google Translate is probably still going to be the best option for most people. With that being said, it’s not 100% perfect, and there actually is a more accurate translation service that you might want to consider in some situations. In fact, it’s one of the top-rated translation tools when it comes to translation accuracy, though the exact accuracy will depend on the language pairs that you’ve chosen. Yes, Google Translate is very accurate for the most part. If you’re using Google Translate for your translations, you’ll probably be wondering if Google Translate is correct and whether you can trust Google Translate accuracy for your use case.
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