For instance, you want to say “fall down the stairs,” but you end up saying something to the effect of “autumn down the stairs.” The word you’re looking for gets translated into the wrong part of speech.
Who better than to identify these classic tell-tale signs than teachers, though? In a Quora thread, a bunch of foreign language teachers shared the clues that usually tip them off. Sometimes it does so in unpredictable ways, too - a huge risk is that you might end up accidentally lobbing obscenities or sexually explicit words at strangers. The thing about using auto-translation is that it reliably twists your tongue in predictable ways. It’s still far from accurate or fail-proof, however, and a lot of that has to do with its clunkiness around recognizing the intended meaning of non-literal phrases, understanding complex grammatical structures, and more. By processing these translations over and over again and constantly tweaking the outcome, the technology gradually improves on its own. This transition basically meant that instead of comparing words and sentence fragments, it would now be comparing whole sentences to improve contextual accuracy. In other words, if it finds that the probability of one word or phrase matching another word or phrase in another language is high, it then knows that they translate from one to the other.Īdvances in “ deep learning” - which means having, say, 12 layers of information to work with compared to two or three - have allowed Google Translate to effectively handle approximately 100 languages at this point. It establishes patterns by comparing content between pairs of languages via a probability factor (“How likely is it that x should be translated into y?”). By design, this sort of statistical machine translation technology gets better the more language content it has. When Google Translate was launched in 2006, it used United Nations and European Parliament documents to collect language data and look for patterns. Is Google Translate Accurate?Īuto-translation technology has never been perfect - but it’s been steadily improving. The short answer is that if you’re using it in the hopes of faking your fluency, you’ll probably out yourself within the first few words. Is Google Translate accurate? It depends on how you’re using it. But unless you’ve ever tried to explain to your Greek friends that the song lyric “wipe that dirt off your shoulder” doesn’t literally mean “ wipe your shoulders away,” you might not fully understand how weird it sounds when you run complicated passages or idioms through Google Translate in an effort to sound vaguely intelligible. Look, no one’s trying to make the case that auto-translation technology isn’t useful.
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