Google Translate's coverage
has been expanded dramatically. It now supports the translation between
any of the following languages: English, Arabic,
Bulgarian, Chinese,
Croatian,
Czech,
Danish, Dutch,
Finnish, French, German, Greek,
Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
Norwegian,
Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish,
Swedish
(the new languages are shown in bold). From 26 language pairs, Google
Translate now supports 506 language pairs and becomes the most
comprehensive online translation tool available for free.
Obviously,
the translation is far from being perfect or even coherent, but it's a
great way to understand the central ideas from a text. Now that Google
Translate supports so many languages, it's not hard to imagine that
you'll be able to read almost any web page in your language and maybe
any application will be able to use
Google Translate's APIs to speak your language.
"Most
state-of-the-art, commercial machine-translation systems in use today
have been developed using a rule-based approach, and require a lot of
work to define vocabularies and grammars. Our system takes a different
approach: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both
monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of
examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply
statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. (...)
Automatic translation is very difficult, as the meaning of words
depends on the context in which they're used. While we are working on
the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer a quick and
seamless translation experience,"
explains Google Translate's FAQ.
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