Google Translate turns 6, has 200 million monthly users

In Douglas Adam’s iconic Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a universe teeming with billions of languages and dialects understand each other thanks to the Babel fish. The fish is inserted through the ear, whereupon it “feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix.”

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In reality thankfully, there is Google Translate, which does not require the insertion of a fish or indeed any living creature through any bodily orifice. It only requires a working Internet connection, the text you want translated, and voila! Instant understanding.

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And as more and more people come around to the magic of the service, Google Translator turned six with the impressive news that its services were being used by 200 million people every month.

In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in one million books," Google Translate engineer Franz Och said in a blog post.

“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.”

The service can translate 64 different languages including Hindi, Bengali, Swahili and Yiddish.

Google admits though, that, of course, no machine can replace the nuanced translation capabilities of a human expert, and as the machine grows, the importance of the nuanced human expert will grow alongside its service. Or maybe we can wait for the Babel fish to evolve. But until then, Google Translate is doing a pretty good job. Happy Birthday!