Google Translate is now smarter than ever

Google has vastly updated its popular Translate service that powers the smartphones and tablet app as well as the website. The company has now incorporated a new Deep Learning version of Translate that will be rolling out in eight languages to start.

According to Google, the new Neural Machine Translation tool will consider the entire input sentence as a unit for translation, as opposed to the earlier statistical approach that worked more with individual words. This means, the app will now translate entire sentences at a time with more natural results, rather than just piece by piece. The advantage of this approach is that it requires fewer engineering design choices compared to the previous Phrase-Based translation system.

At the moment, the supported languages include English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish. The result when translating between these languages is more natural, with better syntax and grammar, Google said.

Over time, the new system will also learn and create better, more natural translations. Eventually, Google plans to roll out Neural Machine Translation out to all 103 languages and locations where users can access Google Translate.

With this update, the company believes that “Translate is improving more in a single leap than we’ve seen in the last ten years combined.”