Most of us will probably have used Google’s Translate service at some point, and now Google has shared some details on how popular their language translate service has become.

According to Google, the service is used by more that 200 million people per month, and the service translates the equivalent text that can be found in more than 1 million books every day.

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.

Google Translate can now translate websites and text in more than 64 different languages, you can find out more details over at the Google Blog.

Source The Next Web