working of Google translator

Google has come up with many interesting and innovating products from its beginning till now. It has reached an iconic status and is a familiar name almost all over the world. No matter which country, region or culture, Google is the primary and most popular search engine used by people everywhere. The Google translator is one such innovation. But how does the program work and can it really offer an accurate translation?

These questions pertaining to the Google translator can be answered in a series of steps. Before knowing the ‘how,’ the ‘what’ has to be answered. Google translator is a free translation service offered by Google that can produce a translation of a particular sentence in about 57 different languages. The Google translator can also translate words and entire web pages as well. It is a very convenient tool as it makes information accessible to people who might not understand the language pertaining to the information source.

Now the ‘how’ part of the question. Google translator is able to translate by looking for patterns in the existing hundreds of millions of documents and decides which one is more suited for the situation. These hundreds of millions of documents are translations done by human beings and stored by Google. So basically the Google translator works by a process of intelligent guesses although officially this process is called a statistical machine translation.

Now herein lies the catch. Google translator can effectively translate information into various languages but the accuracy of the translation is not perfect in any way. The translation is after all done by a machine which looks at a translation in different ways than a real human would. Human beings are able to learn a new language by navigating and understanding the rules that govern it. But the method used by the Google translator is a different one.

Therefore in the end, Google translator can produce the gist of the translation you need but cannot be used as a tool for complex translation problems. Taking a real language class would be far more productive. But you might never know perhaps in a few years Google translator and other translation programs would be enough to comfortably tour a foreign country without knowing the language.