Google

Inside Google Translate

Find out how our translations are created

What is Google Translate?

Google Translate is a free translation service that provides instant translations between 57 different languages. It can translate words, sentences and web pages between any combination of our supported languages. With Google Translate, we hope to make information universally accessible and useful, regardless of the language in which it’s written.

How does it work?

When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be. This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called "statistical machine translation". Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation will be perfect. The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyse in a specific language, the better the translation quality will be. This is why translation accuracy will sometimes vary across languages.

What languages does Google Translate support?

Google Translate currently supports 57 languages:

Afrikaans
Albanian
Arabic
Belarusian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malay
Maltese
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Welsh
Yiddish

Current alpha languages are:

Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Georgian
Haitian Creole
Urdu

Google Translate tests other languages, called "alpha languages", that may have less-reliable translation quality than our supported languages. We are always working to support other languages and will introduce them as soon as the translation quality meets our standards.

What can I do to improve Translation quality?

If you notice that one of our translations could be better, click the "Contribute a better translation" link on the results page to suggest improvements. You can also help improve translation quality by using Translator Toolkit for translating or by uploading your translation memories into Translator Toolkit.

Want to learn more?

If you still have questions about Google Translate or would like to provide feedback, please take a look at the Google Translate discussion group.

You can read more about our most recent updates on the Google Translate Blog and about Google’s other research projects at the Google Research website.

To learn more about the science of machine translation, take a look at these resources:
Machine Translation Archive
Statistical Machine Translation