It served over 200 million people daily in May 2013, and over 500 million total users as of April 2016update, with more than 100 billion words translated daily. In its Written Words Translation function, there is a word limit on the amount of text that can be translated at once. A word in a foreign language might have two different meanings in the translated language. It aims to translate whole phrases rather than single words then gather overlapping phrases for translation. Although Google has deployed a new system called neural machine translation for better quality translation, there are languages that still use the traditional translation method called statistical machine translation. From October 2007, Google Translate used proprietary, in-house technology based on statistical machine translation instead, before transitioning to neural machine translation.

Google Translate also provides translations for Google Assistant and the devices that Google Assistant runs on such as Google Nest and Pixel Buds. Upon highlighting text in an app that is in a foreign language, Translate will pop up inside of the app and offer translations. In January 2015, the apps gained the ability to propose translations of physical signs in real time using the device's camera, as a result of Google's acquisition of the Word Lens app. The 'Camera input' functionality allows users to take a photograph of a document, signboard, etc. A January 2011 Android version experimented with a "Conversation Mode" that aims to allow users to communicate fluidly with a nearby person in another language. The Android app was released in January 2010, and for iOS on February 8, 2011, after an HTML5 web application was released for iOS users in August 2008.

The Google Translate app for Android and iOS supports 249 languages and can propose translations for 37 languages via photo, 32 via voice in "conversation mode", and 27 via live video imagery in "augmented reality mode". The browser version of Google Translate provides the option to show phonetic equivalents of text translated from Japanese to English. For most of its features, Google Translate provides pronunciation, a dictionary, and listening to translations. Google Translate can translate multiple forms of text and media, which includes text, speech, and text within still or moving images. Moreover, the system automatically identifies foreign languages and translates speech without requiring individuals to tap the microphone button whenever speech translation is needed.

By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate makes informed guesses (AI) as to what an appropriate translation should be. To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used United Nations and European Parliament documents and transcripts. Hence, publishing in English, using unambiguous words, providing context, or using expressions such as "you all" may or may not make a better one-step translation depending on the target language. In November 2016, Google transitioned its translating method to a system called neural machine translation. As of February 2010, it was integrated into browsers such as Chrome and was able to pronounce the translated text, automatically recognize words in a picture and spot unfamiliar text and languages. It translates multiple forms of texts and media such as words, phrases and webpages. Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. Certain texts in Japanese have been shown to be translated to "Replying to @sarah_mcdonald(s)" in English, often with no relation to the source text.

Translation Methodology

Novelty websites like Bad Translator and Translation Party have used the service to produce humorous text by translating back and forth between multiple languages, similar to the children's game telephone. (English database designed and developed for Foras na Gaeilge by Lexicography MasterClass Ltd.) Welsh language data from Gweiadur by Gwerin. Therefore, long text should be transferred to a document form and translated through its Document Translate function. Additionally, grammatical errors remain a major limitation to the accuracy of Google Translate. In September 2016, a research team at Google announced the development of the Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT) to increase fluency and accuracy in Google Translate and in November announced that Google Translate would switch to GNMT.

When Google Translate generates a translation proposal, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation. Google representatives have been involved with lmct+ casino domestic conferences in Japan where it has solicited bilingual data from researchers. The UN typically publishes documents in all six official UN languages, which has produced a very large 6-language corpus. Statistical models from these data are then used to translate between those languages. For example, translating vous from French to Russian gives vous → you → ты OR Bы/вы. Instead, it often translates first to English and then to the target language (L1 → EN → L2). Original versions of Google Translate were based on a method called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003. In April 2006, Google Translate launched with a statistical machine translation engine.

It can scan text or a picture using the device and have it translated instantly. In May 2014, Google acquired Word Lens to improve the quality of visual and voice translation. Since SMT uses predictive algorithms to translate text, it had poor grammatical accuracy. The input text had to be translated into English first before being translated into the selected language. Originally, Google Translate was released as a statistical machine translation (SMT) service.