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.
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.
Google Translate currently supports 57 languages:
Current alpha languages are:
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.
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.
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