Does Google Translate pronounce correctly?

Any studentsusingGoogleTranslate to cheat on their Spanishhomework canrejoice. The foreign-language translationtoolis about to get a whole lot more accurate.

Last week,Google launched an updatedtranslation tool that utilizes sophisticatedartificial intelligence to produce startlingly accurate language translations. While the tool has been used to successfully translate between English and Spanish, French and Chinese in a research setting, its only available currently to everyday users for Chinese to English translations. The new system, which uses deep machine learning to mimic the functioning of a human brain, is called theGoogle Neural Machine Translation system, or GNMT.

To test the system, Google had human raters evaluate translations on a scale from 0 to 6. Translating from English to Spanish, the new Google tools translation was rated an average of5.43; human translators earned an average of 5.5. For Chinese to English, the only public-facing optionthat currently utilizes the new system, Google Translatewas rated an average of 4.3 while human translatorsgot4.6.

Overall, across all three languages, Google said its new toolis 60 percent more accuratethanthe old Google Translate tool, which used phrase-based machine translation, or PBMT.With the previous PBMT model, when we translate a sentence from one language to another, we would translate one word or a phrase in the source sentence at a time,thenre-order the words in the correct grammar of the target language, saidQuoc Le, a Google researcher who worked on the project. The complication is language has a lot of ambiguity.In our new GNMT system, we treat a whole sentence as a unit, and translate[the words]in a group.

The complexity of a translationmachine that can digest entire phrases rather than rely on word-by-word translationaresomewhat lost even on the researchers themselves.In an interview with MIT Technology review, Le called the new translator unsettling. But weve tested it in a lot of places and it just works.

Despite its improved accuracy,the GNMT modelstill mistranslatesrare terms and occasionally drops words. And it hasnt acquiredany common sense. Giventhe sentence The trophy cannot fit in the cabinet because its too big, the model could mistranslate because it doesnt know which it is the one thats too big.GNMTdoesnt have a model of how the world actually works yet, said Le.

While the tool is only being offeredfor one language pairnow, Google saidit plansto roll out the new system to more of the 10,000 language pairs that Google Translate currently supports. We hope this research increases the ability for people around the world to communicate with others regardless of what languages they speak, said Le.