Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About Google Translate

I really like Google. I have to admit. They do an excellent job. I use Google Apps, and I use Google for my email, after a more or less horrible experience with GoDaddy, the American Internet hosting company (calendars that don't work, email that crashed and help desk people who had no answer, etc.). I am reading a book called "What Would Google Do ?", by Jeff Jarvis, about how our world is becoming "Google-ized", and how businesses can take advantage of that. Google is truly revolutionizing our world.

As a translator, I have a love / hate relationship with Google Translate. On the one hand, I share some trepidation about "the computer replacing the human" translator (while realizing that really won't happen), and at the same time, I find machine translation to be sometimes a time-saving tool (particularly when directly integrated into a CAT tool like WordFast or OmegaT). It is a mixed bag, but on the whole, I think that our world is a bit richer, because of Google Translate.

We translators know about Google Translate, but what didn't you know ? I have put together a short list of "things you probably didn't know about Google Translate":

• The head of Google Translate is a German. His name is Franz Ochs, and he is an expert in computers and language. He now works in Mountain View, Google's home base in the Bay Area of California, but he is originally from Germany. He studied in Germany and California and was later asked by the U.S. government for help after 9/11, but he went to work at Google. 
• One main goal of Google Translate is to empower non-native speakers of English. Let's face it, 70% of the Internet sites in the world are written in English, with American English being particularly dominant. If you are a teenager in China or Mali or Brazil, maybe you have not mastered English yet, but want to read certain websites. Google Translate is designed to help you figure out, in an instant, what a website is about. 
• Google uses as its source text four main things: Biblical texts (the Bible has been translated into every language known to man), texts from the United Nations (UN), and texts from The European Union (EU). This might be one reason that GT does a better job with European languages, than with non-European langauges. Another main source is - surprisingly - mystery novels. For this reason, Google Translate produces relatively decent legal and diplomatic texts. And if you want a chunk of a John Grisham novel translated, it can probably do that too. 
• Google translate does not "think", it uses a statistical approach. From that point of view, it really - in my view - is not that different from a CAT (computer-assisted) tool. In fact, Google Translate, as I mentioned, is often used directly with a CAT tool, and it is a decent tool. 
• Google Translate is amazingly bad at simple German syntax. It really is quite awful (I am speaking from personal observation here). 
• Google uses English as a "pivot". A pivot is a node through which everything else flows. For instance, if you use Google Translate to translate from Greek to Norwegian, Google Translate will not match Greek source text with Norwegian target text. Instead, it matches Greek with English and then English with Norwegian. English is used as a kind of "lingua franca" or intermediate language for the tool. 
• Franz Ochs, the head of Google Translate, has admitted on more than one occasion, that he does not use the tool much at all ! But he did use it on a trip to Japan, to translate menus. 
• Google has human translators do its own translations. It does not use its own tool (thanks to David Bellos for that insight). 
• Google Translate is helping preserve some endangered languages. Dialects of Maori that are no longer spoken, etc. 
• There are confidentiality issues - for translators and translation companies - in using Google Translate ! Think about it: you are feeding your client's confidential source text into a machine that holds it "forever" and is available then to "the world", i.e. everyone. Few think about this, I am sure. 
• Ochs thinks that improvements will continue in the tool, but admits he does not know where the tool's limits are. 
• Google is fighting a battle - whether it knows it or not - against prescriptivism, the idea that there is a "right" way to speak, defined by pre-set rules (a view for instance that is very strong in France and in other countries). Rather than rules, it looks for how language is actually being used, "on the street", so to say (closer to the German way of lexicography). 
• You can set your website so that it won't be translated by Google Translate. 
• Good translators often Google Translate instead of a dictionary. One experienced patent translator said he does it "When I get lazy".