The news — which comes just two days before Google Translate’s sixth anniversary — shows an increasing desire to communicate with others regardless of language, not only online but offline too.
Google Translate allows users to access and interpret webpages on servers thousands of miles away. The company started to offer a basic translating service in 2001 for eight languages and later expanded to more languages in 2003.
“But at that time our system was too slow to run as a practical service—it took us 40 hours and 1,000 machines to translate 1,000 sentences,” Franz Och, principal scientist at Google, said in a company statement. “So we focused on speed, and a year later our system could translate a sentence in under a second, and with better quality. In early 2006, we rolled out our first languages: Chinese, then Arabic.” The service now offers 64 languages, including many with a small web presence such as Bengali, Yiddish and Esperanto.
In addition to the 200 million monthly active users on translate.google.com, consumers are also accessing Google Translate in other ways, such as via Chrome, mobile apps and YouTube.
More consumers are also accessing Google Translate while traveling than ever before. The company reported its mobile traffic to the service has more than quadrupled year over year. Meanwhile, more than 92% of traffic from Google Translate comes from international users outside the U.S.
Usage is so high that it translates the equivalent of 1 million books each day.
“We imagine a future where anyone in the world can consume and share any information, no matter what language it’s in, and no matter where it pops up,” Och said. “We already provide translation for webpages on the fly as you browse in Chrome, text in mobile photos, YouTube video captions, and speech-to-speech “conversation mode” on smartphones. We want to knock down the language barrier wherever it trips people up, and we can’t wait to see what the next six years will bring.”
Thumbnail via iStockphoto, franckreporter.
This articel source from : Mashable Tech
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