I Used Google Translate to Translate My Driver License!
As you all know, machine translators such as Google Translate, were traditionally not very reliable. There are numerous horror stories of cheapskate customers who rely on it to translate their personal documents such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce decrees and driver licenses and then getting in trouble because of that!
Google Translate started off as a pretty dumb machine translator. It has a simple algorithm based on statistical language analysis and it produced pretty spotty results. Specialists rated its quality at 50% of the normal human rate. That was during 2007 and 2016. However, recently, Google Translate began to experiment with machine neural learning and applied that knowledge to languages. As a result, the quality went up and some pundits claimed it nearly indistinguishable from human. That is a remarkable statement. If compared to the Turing’s machine, the neural translation bot would pass its test tricking a human that robot is a human.
Despite all of that, consumers are still reluctant to trust Google Translate. Especially for the fact that everything that you copy and paste into their tool is being memorized and re-used. That means you have absolutely no privacy protection once you begin to use the online translator.
The way to go is to try to build something for yourself like Amazon did. The good part is that neural translation scripts are all open source and anyone with the money and diligence could try to use it. The most application for this technology is online, of course. When it comes to website localization, for example, machine translation becomes very handy. It meets the necessary requirements: all texts are digitized, public and colloquial. Machine translators do a remarkably quick and efficient job translating them. There are a number of website plugins sprung up on the market including our own: conveythis translate. So, the future of Google Translate seems bright despite all the setbacks.
Do you agree?
