And so a German-to-English translation went something like: (Remember, german students: the verb always goes at the end).

With a statistical model, Google had no way of understanding how to turn the sentence structure around. Truth be told, the most significant problems came up when translating languages with utterly different word order. This is just an analogy for all the #googlefails memes that swarmed the internet. Simply put, it meant that Google translated meaning on a word level. But the translation algorithm was built on a statistical model. At the time, it was based on zillions of human translations made by the European Parliament and the United Nations. Google launched its automated translation tool back in 2006. What is Google Translate, and how does it work?

The results are rather interesting.īut let’s start with some background first. We gave Google Translate a spin with four languages and assessed the accuracy of their translations into English: Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian. So, how accurate is Google Translate today?Īnd who better to assess its accuracy than a leading translation services provider? But whoever uses the automated translation tool can tell you that it still has its glitches and faults. Google Translate has come a long way since its #googlefail days of yore.

Google translate in spanish and english