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| Google Translate Logo |
Believe it or not, all of us in this class have used, are using, will use or always use Google Translate. Sometimes we stumble upon words in books, newspapers or even our friends' Facebook posts that we don't know. Sometimes if we are just too lazy, we'd ask our friends what is the meaning of this word and often we hear "Just Google Translate it lahhh" when our friends are lazy either. Perhaps, we must have used Google Translate to impress our friends that we know how to speak and write in Korean or even Indonesian language! One thing for sure, assignments make students become much closer with Google Translate *how sweet*.
Typically, we only know how to use it. Have we ever wondered or thought how does Google Translate work? Does it have an invisible man behind our screen monitor to do the translation?
How does it really work?
- When it generates you a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you.
- By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be
- This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called "statistical machine translation".
- Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation will be perfect.
- The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyse in a specific language, the better the translation quality will be.
- This is why translation accuracy will sometimes vary across languages.
