Google is using Neural Networks to improve translation quality for languages as the company has just announced today their Neural Machine Translation System, which they state has vastly improved translation and that it has helped them make the largest improvements to date. Google has started utilizing the GNMTS first by translating Chinese sentences into English, while discussing that they decided to make the change from using a Phrase-Based Machine Translation system due to the fact that it translates input sentences independently after they’ve been broken up into various words and phrases. While this was working, Google states that the Neural Machine Translation System allows them to take the entire input sentence and consider it for translation as a single unit.
Because of this method and the way that GNMTS works in translating input sentences, the lack of having to break them up into phrases and words means they can translate input sentences faster and more accurately as they show in the below graph image. It’s also being stated that because of the ability to translate entire input sentences that the system has been able to complete an estimate of 18 million daily translations of Chinese input sentences to English. While Google is utilizing the GNMTS to translate all sentences from Chinese over to English right now, there is no mention of what the next language translation set will be.
Google does note however, that the GNMTS is being used within the mobile Google Translate app as well as through the web version of the service. Now that Google has begun to utilize their neural network technology to translate sentences from one language to another beginning with the Chinese to English translations, Google notes that their next efforts will be to continue trying to further improve and then solve the matter of Machine Translation, as they note that the technology can still make errors that humans would never make when completing translations. Google states that throughout the near future they will be working to bring the Neural Machine Translations System to other language translations as well, mentioning that the process will continue to happen over the coming months. This doesn’t give an exact time frame of how long the process will take to start using GNMTS for all the language translations that Google supports, but it does display that they’re working on the project continually.
