Is Google translate actually accurate?

According to a 2021 study conducted by the UCLA Medical Center Google Translate preserved the overall meaning for 82.5% of the translations but certain languages do contain gaps while translating.

One thing to keep in mind about the accuracy of Google Translate is that it works best when translating literary text into English showing a 72% accuracy when converting English casual texts into other languages. That’s why you can end up with weird translations that don’t make sense when trying to render everyday expressions into other languages.

English translation remains Google Translate’s biggest strength. According to a 2013 study that evaluated Google Translate’s accuracy in data extraction from non-English languages, extracting translated articles typically took longer than with English-language articles.

Generally, Google Translate works better with European languages such as German, Finnish or Danish, but has problems with several Asian languages or dead languages, like Latin or Ancient Greek.

5 Hardest Languages to Translate:

• Mandarin Chinese
• Korean
• Arabic
• Thai
• Hungarian

As regards to the translation of Mandarin Chinese, problems are often found in the sheer number of characters which comes out to 50,000–80,000 characters depending on the speaker, each with its own meaning and sometimes very subtle differences in contrast to the 26 letters of the English language.

Just to be considered literate in Chinese, you need to know about 2,500–4,000 characters. Quite a few more than 26, isn’t it?

Now moving on to the translation of Korean problems are often found in their unique writing system. However, unlike Chinese, here it’s more like an alphabet. It uses 24 basic letters, 14 consonants and 10 vowels, and there are 27 complex letters you can create by combining the basic letters.

The main difficulties of the translation stem from its unique grammatical structure. It uses a subject – object – verb syntax that can get very complex in longer sentences.

• In addition, it has many particles that denote meaning and grammatical function. Plus, like other languages, Korean has lots of homonyms that spell and sound the same but have different meanings.

Now concerning Arabic, the number of dialects and the fact that they are very different from each other is one of the main factors that make Arabic hard to translate. If you are not familiar with a particular dialect, it’s very easy to get the meaning wrong.

• In addition, Arabic is said to have a large vocabulary, some even claim there are 12 million Arabic words. While there are no verified sources for that, with so many dialects, it does make sense that there would be a large number of unique words existing apart from each other.

Thai in its nature as a tone language with its own writing system already qualifies as one of the hardest languages to translate. However, there are some extra factors that increase its difficulty.

Thai also has a unique syntax, for example, adverbs and adjectives appear after the words they modify. All of this doesn’t make it easy on Google translate.

Lastly, mentioning Hungarian has a very complex grammar. It’s known to be a language with one of the most peculiar grammar rules out there having 14–35 different cases and using a lot of suffixes, for example, to determine tense and possession.

At the same time, it only has two tenses and you need to look to sentence context to understand more complex temporal relationships.

• In addition, Hungarian has fourteen vowels with different accents that can change their meaning. What’s more, it uses a lot of idioms that you have to be culturally adept enough to understand. All of this makes it hard to learn and translate.

Other Difficult-to-Translate Languages:

• Japanese
• Finnish
• Mongolian
• Polish
• Icelandic

Easiest languages to be translated based on a study:

Google Translate’s accuracy depends on how much data is available for the target language. Since almost 60% of websites are in English, Google Translate has a lot of input to work with. That’s why it has the highest accuracy for English language pairs. On the other hand, since only 2% of web pages are in Portuguese, it is highly unlikely that you will receive a specific and corresponding translation

Other popular translation tools include DeepL, Amazon Translate, and Microsoft Translator, which all use machine learning to inform and improve their services. DeepL uses Linguee’s extensive database of manually translated phrases, sentences, expressions, and excerpts since the same businesses developed them. Amazon’s service relies on neural networks engineered to translate between a source language and a target language. Like Amazon, Microsoft Translator relies on NMT to power its translations.

Should you in conclusion use Google Translate?

Nonetheless, Google Translate is still a great tool that can save you a lot of time and money for your website translation needs. Accuracy highly depends on your intent, style, and the person receiving your message. So if all you need is to translate a few brief, simple phrases, it’ll serve you just fine but you should choose alternative translators in cases of more complex text and languages.