

While you may have selected just those two languages, here’s how Google Translate actually worked on the backend: This is why pre-2016 translations often felt robotic and didn’t sound natural.Īnother issue is that this old system relied on using English as an intermediary for each translation.įor example, let’s say you translated text from Spanish to German. Instead, it essentially translated word-for-word. While that approach was ok for single words or short phrases, it caused a lot of issues with longer, more complex sentences because Google Translate wasn’t able to accurately assess the context of the sentence as a whole. This model is called statistical machine translation, or SMT for short.

How Does Google Translate Work?īefore we talk about how reliable Google Translate is, let’s quickly run over some basic details on how Google Translate actually works behind the scenes.

Want more details about Google Translate accuracy? Keep reading our full post to learn all of the gory details. However, there are tradeoffs with that alternative, which is why Google Translate is probably still going to be the best option for most people. With that being said, it’s not 100% perfect, and there actually is a more accurate translation service that you might want to consider in some situations. In fact, it’s one of the top-rated translation tools when it comes to translation accuracy, though the exact accuracy will depend on the language pairs that you’ve chosen. Yes, Google Translate is very accurate for the most part. If you’re using Google Translate for your translations, you’ll probably be wondering if Google Translate is correct and whether you can trust Google Translate accuracy for your use case.
