In 2001, Google started providing a service that could translate eight languages to and from English. It used what was then state-of-the-art commercial machine translation (MT), but the translation quality wasn’t very good, and it didn’t improve much in those first few years. In 2003, a few Google engineers decided to ramp up the translation quality and tackle more languages. That's when I got involved. I was working as a researcher on DARPA projects looking at a new approach to machine translation—learning from data—which held the promise of much better translation quality. I got a phone call from those Googlers who convinced me (I was skeptical!) that this data-driven approach might work at Google scale.
I joined Google, and we started to retool our translation system toward competing in the NIST Machine Translation Evaluation, a “bake-off” among research institutions and companies to build better machine translation. Google’s massive computing infrastructure and ability to crunch vast sets of web data gave us strong results. This was a major turning point: it underscored how effective the data-driven approach could be.
But at that time our system was too slow to run as a practical service—it took us 40 hours and 1,000 machines to translate 1,000 sentences. So we focused on speed, and a year later our system could translate a sentence in under a second, and with better quality. In early 2006, we rolled out our first languages: Chinese, then Arabic.
We announced our statistical MT approach on April 28, 2006, and in the six years since then we’ve focused primarily on core translation quality and language coverage. We can now translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish, even Esperanto.
Today we have 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, YouTube, etc.). People also seem eager to access Google Translate 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.
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. (We can’t speak for the galaxy; Douglas Adams’s “Babel fish” probably has us beat there.) Of course, for nuanced or mission-critical translations, nothing beats a human translator—and we believe that as machine translation encourages people to speak their own languages more and carry on more global conversations, translation experts will be more crucial than ever.
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.
Posted by Franz Och, Distinguished Research Scientist, Google Translate
What do a former violent jihadist from Indonesia, an ex-neo-Nazi from Sweden and a Canadian who was held hostage for 15 months in Somalia have in common? In addition to their past experiences with radicalization, they are all also members of Against Violent Extremism (AVE), a new online network that is launching today from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) with support from our think/do tank Google Ideas, the Gen Next Foundation and other partners. This is the first time that former extremists, survivors, nonprofits and private sector leaders from around the world are combining forces and using online tools to tackle the problem of violent extremism.
The idea for this network first came about last summer when we hosted the Summit Against Violent Extremism in Dublin. We wanted to initiate a global conversation on how best to prevent youth from becoming radicalized. In some ways, it was a bit of an experiment to see if we could get so-called “formers”—those who had renounced their previous lives of violent extremism—and survivors of such violence to come together in one place.
To reframe the issue of counter-radicalization, we decided to spotlight formers as positive role models for youth. We also knew that there has traditionally been an over-reliance on governments to tackle these problems, so we wanted to see what diverse groups outside the public sector could offer. Finally, we needed to go beyond the in-person, physical conversations we had at the summit into the realm of the virtual, using the Internet to ensure sustained discussion and debate.
Until now, there has never before been a one-stop shop for people who want to help fight these challenges—a place to connect with others across sectors and disciplines to get expertise and resources. The AVE web platform contains tools for those wanting to act on this issue, forums for dialogue, and information about the projects that the network has spawned. The site, which is in beta, will be managed by ISD, a London-based think tank that has long worked on issues surrounding radicalization. AVE’s seed members are a global network of formers, survivors of violent extremism, NGOs, academics, think tanks and private sector execs—all with a shared goal of preventing youth from becoming radicalized. You can hear from some of the participants in this video here:
Working with the formers over the past several months has turned out to be an exploration of a kind of illicit network: violent extremism. But it’s touched on other types of illicit networks too—such as drug smuggling, human trafficking and the underground arms trade. With the launch of the AVE network, we plan to turn much of our attention over the next several months to these other areas. This afternoon as part of the Tribeca Film Festival, I will be moderating a panel discussion, Illicit Networks: Portrayal Through Film, talking to a former child soldier, a farm laborer who’s gone undercover to investigate modern-day slavery, a survivor of trafficking and abuse, and a former arms broker. We’ll be watching various movie clips and discussing what people learn from Hollywood when it comes to the mysterious and misunderstood world of illicit networks.
This will be an early look at what’s to come this summer when we will again partner with Tribeca Enterprises and the Council on Foreign Relations (as we did last year in Dublin) to convene the Illicit Networks: Forces in Opposition (INFO) Summit. We plan to bring together a diverse cross-section of activists, survivors, policymakers and engineers to come up with creative ideas about how technology can disrupt some of the world’s most dangerous illicit networks. We want to look not only at how technology has been part of the problem, but how it can be part of the solution by empowering those who are adversely affected by illicit networks. We look forward to sharing with you what we learn.
Posted by Jared Cohen, Director, Google Ideas
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