Google announced on Tuesday that it is rolling out an experimental AI-powered feature in Google Translate designed to help people practice and learn new languages. The update is aimed at both beginners starting out with conversational basics and advanced learners refreshing vocabulary. The feature creates tailored listening and speaking exercises that adapt to each user’s skill level and goals. Learners can practice by listening to conversations and tapping words they recognize………Continue reading….
By: Dayne Lee
Source: Digital Market Reports
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Critics:
Google Translate can translate multiple forms of text and media, which includes text, speech, and text within still or moving images. Specifically, its functions include:
- Written Words Translation: a function that translates written words or text to a foreign language.
- Website Translation: a function that translates a whole webpage to selected languages.
- Document Translation: a function that translates a document uploaded by the users to selected languages. The documents should be in the form of: .doc, .docx, .odf, .pdf, .ppt, .pptx, .ps, .rtf, .txt, .xls, .xlsx.[27]
- Speech Translation: a function that instantly translates spoken language into the selected foreign language.
- Mobile App Translation: in 2018, Google introduced its new Google Translate feature called “Tap to Translate”, which made instant translation accessible inside any app without exiting or switching it.
- Image Translation: a function that identifies text in a picture taken by the users and translates text on the screen instantly by images.
- Handwritten Translation: a function that translates language that are handwritten on the phone screen or drawn on a virtual keyboard without the support of a keyboard.
- Bilingual Conversation Translation: a function that translates conversations in multiple languages
- Transcription: a function that transcribes speech in different languages.
For most of its features, Google Translate provides the pronunciation, dictionary, and listening to translation. Additionally, Google Translate has introduced its own Translate app, so translation is available with a mobile phone in offline mode. Google Translate produces approximations across languages of multiple forms of text and media, including text, speech, websites, or text on display in still or live video images.
For some languages, Google Translate can synthesize speech from text, and in certain pairs it is possible to highlight specific corresponding words and phrases between the source and target text. Results are sometimes shown with dictional information below the translation box, but it is not a dictionary and has been shown to invent translations in all languages for words it does not recognize.
If “Detect language” is selected, text in an unknown language can be automatically identified. In the web interface, users can suggest alternate translations, such as for technical terms, or correct mistakes. These suggestions may be included in future updates to the translation process. If a user enters a URL in the source text, Google Translate will produce a hyperlink to a machine translation of the website. Users can save translation proposals in a “phrasebook” for later use, and a shareable URL is generated for each translation.
For some languages, text can be entered via an on-screen keyboard, whether through handwriting recognition or speech recognition. It is possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing one to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language. Texts written in the Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari and Greek scripts can be automatically transliterated from their phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet.
The browser version of Google Translate provides the option to show phonetic equivalents of text translated from Japanese to English. The same option is not available on the paid API version. Many of the more popular languages have a “text-to-speech” audio function that is able to read back a text in that language, up to several hundred words or so. In the case of pluricentric languages, the accent depends on the region:
For English, in the Americas, most of the Asia–Pacific and West Asia, the audio uses a female General American accent, whereas in Europe, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Guyana and all other parts of the world, a female British (Received Pronunciation) accent is used, except for a special General Australian accent used in Australia, New Zealand and Norfolk Island, and an Indian English accent used in India.
For Spanish, in the Americas, a Latin American accent is used, while in other parts of the world, a Castilian accent is used; for French, a Quebec accent is used in Canada, while in other parts of the world, a standard European accent is used; for Bengali, a male Bangladeshi accent is used, except in India, where a special female Indian Bengali accent is used instead. Until March 2023, some less widely spoken languages used the open-source eSpeak synthesizer for their speech; producing a robotic, awkward voice that may be difficult to understand.
Google Translate is available in some web browsers as an optional downloadable extension that can run the translation engine, which allow right-click command access to the translation service. In February 2010, Google Translate was integrated into the Google Chrome browser by default, for optional automatic webpage translation. Google Translate does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical or pattern analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis.
The system’s original creator, Franz Josef Och, has criticized the effectiveness of rule-based algorithms in favor of statistical approaches. Original versions of Google Translate were based on a method called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003. Och was the head of Google’s machine translation group until leaving to join Human Longevity, Inc. in July 2014.
Google Translate does not directly translate from one language to another (L1 → L2). Instead, it often translates first to English and then to the target language (L1 → EN → L2). However, because English, like all human languages, is ambiguous and depends on context, this can cause translation errors. For example, translating vous from French to Russian gives vous → you → ты OR Bы/вы.
If Google were using an unambiguous, artificial language as the intermediary, it would be vous → you → Bы/вы OR tu → thou → ты. Such a suffixing of words disambiguates their different meanings. Hence, publishing in English, using unambiguous words, providing context, or using expressions such as “you all” may or may not make a better one-step translation depending on the target language.
Google used to have crowdsourcing features for volunteers to be a part of its “Translate Community”, intended to help improve Google Translate’s accuracy. Volunteers could select up to five languages to help improve translation; users could verify translated phrases and translate phrases in their languages to and from English, helping to improve the accuracy of translating more rare and complex phrases. In August 2016, a Google Crowdsource app was released for Android users, in which translation tasks are offered.
There were three ways to contribute. First, Google showed a phrase that one should type in the translated version. Second, Google showed a proposed translation for a user to agree, disagree, or skip. Third, users could suggest translations for phrases where they think they can improve on Google’s results. Tests in 44 languages showed that the “suggest an edit” feature led to an improvement in a maximum of 40% of cases over four years.
Despite its role in improving translation quality and expanding language coverage, Google closed the Translate Community on March 28, 2024. Shortly after launching the translation service for the first time, Google won an international competition for English–Arabic and English–Chinese machine translation. Since Google Translate uses statistical matching to translate, translated text can often include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors, often swapping common terms for similar but nonequivalent common terms in the other language, as well as inverting sentence meaning.
Novelty websites like Bad Translator and Translation Party have used the service to produce humorous text by translating back and forth between multiple languages,similar to the children’s game telephone. Certain texts in Japanese have shown to be translated to “Replying to @sarah_mcdonald(s)” in English, often with no relation to the source text. Examples include “もーるるるるるるるる”, “バチバチで草” and “絵にfう”. This has been asked on multiple platforms, including YouTube.
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