Living in an internet-driven society that is also global, it helps to learn another language or two. For those of us who do not have the time or patience to learn another language, there is Google Translate, a cool web tool that allows users to translate blocks of text from one language to another. This tool works with many different languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and many more.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) recently shared a post on their blog that featured some fascinating statistics regarding their service. They also announced that they reached over 200 million users and many of them access Google Translate via mobile internet. Even more fascinating? About 92% of their users are outside the United States. They also translate about 1 million books worth of text a day.
Google Translate first launched the service in 2001. It featured eight languages that could be transfer to and from English. Two years later, they wanted to add more languages, so the company embarked on a NIST Machine Translation Evaluation. This helped Google build upon their large infrastructure system and crunch “vast sets of data”, This gave them strong results. It took them longer than expected (approximately 40 hours and 1,000 machines) to translate 1,000 sentences. By the beginning of 2006, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) added Chinese and Arabic. A few months later, they shared their statistical MT approach and have since added many more languages. And that was just six years ago!
Technology has changed so much in the last twenty years or so since the internet has been around, and it is truly amazing to see all the advancements that have been made. I wonder what Google Translate will be like six years from now?
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) is a smart company that knows how to make innovative services that integrate with people’s lives.
