As you might expect, Google Translate has global appeal, and 92 percent of its traffic comes from outside the U.S.
"In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you'd find in 1 million books. To put it another way: what all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day. By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate," writes Google Translate research scientist Franz Och in a Thursday .
Machine Translation (MT) technology has coming a long way since 2001 when Google introduced its first MT service that translated eight languages to and from English.
The initial system " wasn't very good, and it didn't improve much in those first few years," admits Och, who says that years of fine-tuning the translation engine has led to the Google Translate that millions of Internet-connected users rely on today.
The service now translates between 64 languages, including less common (at least online) choices such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish, and Esperanto.