Today Google announced the 6th anniversary of their Translate website, and also an interesting fact about how many people take advantage of its services. Each month the site receives over 200 million visitors. That’s astounding. Driving all that traffic is a huge mobile audience. Most of the traffic, by the way, is actually outside the United States (92%).
In fact, right now Google Translate is translating more language in a day, than all the human translators combined, are translating in a year. If that’s not impressive, I don’t know what is. Most of the translation taking place on this planet is done by Google Translate.
Google Translate engineer Franz Och comments on the service:
“We can now translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small Web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish… and even Esperanto,”
“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.”
“In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in one million books,”
Google Translate sounds like a real winner, and I was surprised to hear that there really are few other translation competitors out there, including real humans. I guess the simplicity and ease of having it available at your fingertips is its most attractive feature. Mobile technology and Google truly are making the world an easier place to navigate.