Google Translate Drops Systran For Home Brewed Translation

Google Operating System reports that Google Translate has dropped using Systran as the technology used by Google for translations. Google now uses their own home brewed version of translation technology to translate between the 25 languages available.

Yahoo’s Babel Fish still uses Systran technology, so if you are in a compare and contrast mood, you can compare the two. Google’s technology was created by Google’s research group and uses statistical machine translation. Google’s approach is a bit different from other approaches.

Google explains they:

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. We’ve achieved very good results in research evaluations.

The current language translation pairs include:

• English to/from Arabic
• English to/from Chinese (Simplified)
• English to/from Chinese (Traditional)
• English to/from French
• English to/from German
• English to/from Italian
• English to/from Korean
• English to/from Japanese
• English to/from Russian
• English to/from Spanish
• English to and from Portuguese
• Chinese (Simplified) to/from Chinese (Traditional)
• German to and from French

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.