Google Translate is perhaps one of the most widely used web services by the tech giant. With the billions of webpages written in English, it can be difficult for some non-native English speakers to understand the things on a page. However, there’s also the fact that only 15 percent of the world population speak it as their primary or secondary language. There seems to be no balance but good thing the translate feature is available. Web browsers like Chrome even has it built-in for easier translation.
Google Translate was improved last year when it adapted neural machine translation technology. This allowed translation of whole sentences instead of just phrase by phrase or word by word. This also delivered more relevant translation so people can easily understand the right context with more accuracy.
We know a lot of people are greatly benefiting from this web service but there are still other languages and dialects not given much attention. Quality of translations are low on some but Google today announced that it’s improving neural machine translation for Indonesian and eight more Indian languages: Bengali, Kannada, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Marathi, and Malayalam.
In Chrome, over 20 languages are now enabled with neural machine translations including English for Chinese, German, French, Hindi, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish, and Spanish to English (one-way). We’re expecting more languages will be added in the coming months.
Google focused on India this time because with over 400 million netizens living in India, more people are encountering English content that need to be translated. India has several languages so it’s really necessary that the neural machine translation tech comes in.
