How does google translate work

The practical utility of Google Translate and similar technologies is undeniable, and probably a good thing overall, but there is still something deeply lacking in the approach, which is conveyed by a single word: understanding. Machine translation has never focused on understanding language. Could an entity, human or machine, do high-quality translation without paying attention to what language is all about?

To shed some light on this question, I turn now to the experiments I did. I began my explorations very humbly, using the following short remark, which, in a human mind, evokes a clear scenario:.

In their house, everything comes in pairs. Dans leur maison, tout vient en paires. The program fell into my trap, not realizing, as any human reader would, that I was describing a couple, stressing that for each item he had, she had a similar one. Next I translated the challenge phrase into French myself, in a way that did preserve the intended meaning.

Chez eux, ils ont tout en double. At home, they have everything in double. There is his own car and his own car, his own towels and his own towels, his own library and his own library. We humans know all sorts of things about couples, houses, personal possessions, pride, rivalry, jealousy, privacy, and many other intangibles that lead to such quirks as a married couple having towels embroidered his and hers.

But I still felt I should check the engine out more closely. After all, one swallow does not thirst quench. By the way, I checked my translation with two native speakers of German, including Karl Sigmund, so I think you can assume it is accurate.

As for female scholars, well, they had no place in the system at all; nothing was clearer than that. And scientists did not question anyway; There were few of them.

So far, so good! But soon it grows wobbly, and the further down you go, the wobblier it gets. The last two sentences really bring out how crucial understanding is for translation.

The related letter noun Wissenschaftlerin , found in the closing sentence in its plural form Wissenschaftlerinnen , is a consequence of the gendered-ness of German nouns.

Aside from that blunder, the rest of the final sentence is a disaster. Take its first half. It just consists of English words haphazardly triggered by the German words. Is that all it takes for a piece of output to deserve the label translation? The translation engine was not imagining large or small amounts or numbers of things. It was just throwing symbols around, without any notion that they might symbolize something. For decades, sophisticated people—even some artificial-intelligence researchers—have fallen for the ELIZA effect.

Google Translate is all about bypassing or circumventing the act of understanding language. To me, the word translation exudes a mysterious and evocative aura. It denotes a profoundly human art form that graciously carries clear ideas in Language A into clear ideas in Language B, and the bridging act should not only maintain clarity but also give a sense for the flavor, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of the writing style of the original author. Whenever I translate, I first read the original text carefully and internalize the ideas as clearly as I can, letting them slosh back and forth in my mind.

Needless to say, most of this halo is unconscious. I try to say in Language B what strikes me as a natural B-ish way to talk about the kinds of situations that constitute the halo of meaning in question.

I am not , in short, moving straight from words and phrases in Language A to words and phrases in Language B. This is the kind of thing I imagine when I hear an evocative phrase like deep mind. That said, I turn now to Chinese, a language that gave the deep-learning software a far rougher ride than the two European languages did.

Her book recounts the intertwined lives of herself; her husband, Qian Zhongshu also a novelist and translator , and their daughter. It then makes a connection between the Chinese and Japanese languages. Thereby, translating directly from Chinese to Japanese without the need for English intermediary.

And as the translation engine handles these translations over and over again, it begins to spot patterns between words in different languages and thus becomes better at translating those language pairs. This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

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If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again. Skip to content Menu. How does Google Translate work? Stephen Whiteley. Our computers scan these texts looking for statistically significant patterns--that is to say, patterns between the translation and the original text that are unlikely to occur by chance.

Once the computer finds a pattern, it can use this pattern to translate similar texts in the future. When you repeat this process billions of times you end up with billions of patterns and one very smart computer program. For some languages however we have fewer translated documents available and therefore fewer patterns that our software has detected. This is why our translation quality will vary by language and language pair. So next time you translate a sentence or webpage with Google Translate, think about those millions of documents and billions of patterns that ultimately led to your translation - and all of it happening in the blink of an eye.

Give it a try at translate. How does Google Translate work?