Google has announced that its popular language translator service Google Translate now boasts 200 million monthly users, many of whom are accessing it outside the U.S. and via mobile devices.

Six years ago Google first announced their approach to statistical machine translation and the company has since focused primarily on core translation quality and language coverage. Today Google can translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish, even Esperanto.

Google now reports it has more than 200 million monthly active users on translate.google.com - and even more in other places where you can use Translate, such as Chrome, mobile apps, and YouTube.

According to their official blog, Google Translate has also become quite popular on the go. “The language barrier is never more acute than when you’re traveling - we’ve seen our mobile traffic more than quadruple year over year. And our users are truly global: more than 92 percent of our traffic comes from outside the United States.”

Franz Och, a research scientist with Google Translate sums it up well. “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.”

“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.”

Alex Dupont

See Also

• More about machine translation
  Raw machine translation may be sufficient for communicating via social networks. However, you may have to consider human translation if you require high quality.
• Breaking down the language barrier?six years in (The Official Google translate blog)
  The rise of the web has brought the world?s collective knowledge to the fingertips of more than two billion people.