Launched by Google in October 2007, Google Translate is a free online language translation service that instantly translates a section of text, document or webpage into another language.
Users paste texts in the web interface or supply an hyperlink. The automatic translations are produced by statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis.
As an automatic translation tool, Google Translate can help the reader understand the general content of a foreign language text, but doesn’t deliver accurate translations.
Prior to this date, Google used a Systran based translator like
Babel Fish in Yahoo!, with several stages for the language options:
First stage: English to French, German, and Spanish, and vice
versa.
Second stage: English to Portuguese and Dutch, and vice versa.
Third stage: English to Italian, and vice versa.
Fourth stage: English to simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean,
and vice versa.
Fifth stage (April 2006): English to Arabic, and vice versa.
Sixth stage (December 2006): English to Russian, and vice versa.
Seventh stage (February 2007): English to traditional Chinese, and
simplified Chinese to traditional Chinese, and vice versa.
Here were the first language options for Google’s translation system:
First stage (October 2007): All language pairs previously
available were available in any language combination.
Second stage: English to Hindi, and vice versa.
Third stage (May 2008): Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish,
Finnish, Greek, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, with any
combination.
Fourth stage (September 2008): Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew,
Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene,
Ukrainian, Vietnamese.
Fifth stage (January 2009): Albanian, Estonian, Galician,
Hungarian, Maltese, Thai, Turkish.
Sixth stage (June 2009): Persian.
Seventh stage (August 2009): Afrikaans, Belarussian, Icelandic,
Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, Yiddish.
Eighth stage (January 2010): Haitian Creole.
Ninth stage (May 2010): Armenian, Azeri, Basque, Georgian, Urdu.
Tenth stage (October 2010): Latin.
Etc.
A speech program was launched in 2009 to read the translated text, with new languages added over the months. In January 2011, people could choose different translations for a word in Google Translate.
Google Translator Toolkit is a web service allowing (human) translators to edit the translations automatically generated by Google Translate. Translators can also use shared translations, glossaries and translation memories. Starting in June 2009 with English as a source language and 47 target languages, Google Translator Toolkit supported 100,000 language pairs in May 2011, with 345 source languages into 345 target languages.
2009 > 6,909 LIVING LANGUAGES IN THE ETHNOLOGUE