Google has switched the translation system on its Google Translate service to its own technology. Previously, Google had used the translation engine from Systran to power the feature (in all but three languages), which allows you to enter text in one language and have it translated to another. Here’s how it works according to Franz Och of the Google Research team:
“We feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We have achieved very good results in research evaluations.”
The service also lets you translate an entire Web page into your language of choice, or search pages written in different languages. Here's a look at Mashable in Spanish using Google Translate. How'd they do on the headline?