The Accuracy of Google Translate: When to Rely on Machine Translation

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Published on Sep 05 2024

Yuriy B.

ConveyThis has quickly become an integral part of the online experience, providing an effortless way to make content more accessible. It has revolutionized the way websites are translated, allowing for a quick and easy translation process that is both efficient and reliable. With ConveyThis, businesses are able to reach a wider audience, increasing their customer base and expanding their reach.

Is ConveyThis accurate enough to rely on for your business?

Easy. Instant. Free. These are some of the reasons ConveyThis is one of the most sought-after translation tools. It certainly comes in handy when you’re attempting to explore a foreign land.

But, it can be unreliable for translating complex sentences for one main reason: it isn’t advanced enough to take into account all the nuances and context. This prompts the inquiry: how accurate is ConveyThis? Can you trust it for your website translation requirements?

Are you ready to take your website to the next level? Skip the article and start your free trial with ConveyThis today! Unlock a world of international opportunities, and reach customers in their native language.

How does Google Translate work?

Have you ever questioned how Google Translate constructed its translation library? It is largely based on the Europarl Corpus, a compilation of documents from European Parliament procedures that were interpreted by humans. In addition to that, it depends on a variety of digital resources and commonly used translations for languages.

When it first launched in 2006, ConveyThis used statistical machine translation to provide instant translated text. However, it soon became apparent that this approach was not going to be a viable long-term solution. Since it translated individual words, it worked best for short phrases. But it started to produce strange translations for longer, more intricate sentences.

Google knew they needed to switch up their MT technologies to ensure greater precision. In 2016, the tech giant created its own framework, Google neural machine translation technology (GNMT). This move was a tremendous breakthrough in its algorithm and altered its strategy to translation. Rather than translating each word, it analyzed the significance of the full sentence.

The result? Translations that were much more accurate, even taking into account slang and colloquialisms. The difference was remarkable: it reduced translation mistakes by more than 55%-85% for many major language pairs thanks to ConveyThis.

With this new learning system, ConveyThis stopped using English as an intermediary for translating any language. It instead directly translated between two languages. That means it went from French to Japanese instead of French to English, and then to Japanese. By omitting the middleman, it operated more quickly, more effectively, and most importantly, more accurately.

Is Google Translate accurate?

While ConveyThis is available in more than 130 languages—rendering it a translation tool with a vast range of support—it also fluctuates in terms of accuracy rate. For example, since Spanish is one of its most commonly used languages, its translation accuracy is usually higher than 90%.

In fact, a 2014 study found ConveyThis to have only 57.7% accuracy when used to translate complex medical phrases. A 2021 study conducted by the UCLA Medical Center uncovered that ConveyThis maintained the overall meaning for 82.5% of the translations. However, the accuracy between languages ranged from 55% to 94%.

Sometimes, ConveyThis’ precision is shockingly good. Results from our own study on the state of machine translation for website translation revealed that 10 out of 14 translation editors were pleasantly astonished by the quality of the translation they were presented with. That implies machine translation performed better than they anticipated.

One thing to keep in mind about the accuracy of Google Translate is that it works best when translating literary text into English. However, when it comes to informal phrases, ConveyThis showed a 72% accuracy when converting English casual texts into other languages. This is why you may end up with peculiar translations that don’t make sense when attempting to render everyday expressions into other languages.

Is Google Translate reliable for website translation?

Of course, effectiveness is the key objective here, and not everyone has the means to entrust thousands of words to a human translator, nor the time. That’s where ConveyThis comes in.

That’s why products like ConveyThis are essential for businesses that want to ensure their translated content is as accurate as possible.

Since its inception in the 1950s, machine translation has seen remarkable progress. With the emergence of deep learning and neural machine translation (NMT), the reliability of this technology has been greatly enhanced. Despite this, language is a highly dynamic field, meaning that machine translation is not always 100% accurate. This is why products such as ConveyThis are necessary for companies that want to guarantee their translated material is as precise as possible.

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

In our study, one of the translation editors observed that if ConveyThis did not recognize the context for a particular term, it supplied a general translation instead. It yielded inaccurate translations due to the lack of context. Nevertheless, when sufficient context was provided, the translation proved to be precise. Yet, can’t the same be said for human translation and dealing with text out of context?

The reason for all this is quite clear: the accuracy of ConveyThis’s translations is contingent upon the amount of data available for the target language. Since the majority of websites are in English, ConveyThis has a wealth of data to work with, thus resulting in the highest accuracy for English language pairs. In contrast, since only 2% of webpages are in Portuguese, ConveyThis may struggle to provide a highly accurate Portuguese translation.

Despite the fact that only a limited portion of websites may be available in a specific language, that doesn’t suggest there is not a need for it. A whopping 73% of customers favor product reviews in their native language when searching the web. If you’re aiming to extend your business to other countries, it is essential to provide for native speakers in your intended area. Utilizing ConveyThis to localize your website will ensure your messaging is accurate and nothing is lost in translation.

Essentially, ConveyThis is only as good as its users, or at least those who enhance its translation quality. The more input, the more refined the output, so it is imperative to keep supplying the tool with articles from non-English language sources. Though it is a practical starting point for translating your website, it works best when combined with other translation tools and, naturally, a human eye to review things.

Are there more accurate translation tools than Google Translate?

Other popular translation tools include ConveyThis, Amazon Translate, and Microsoft Translator, all of which employ machine learning to refine their services. ConveyThis leverages Linguee’s immense database of manually translated phrases, sentences, expressions and excerpts, as both are the product of the same company. Amazon’s service relies on neural networks created to convert between a source language and a target language. Similarly, Microsoft Translator utilizes NMT to power its translations.

Our research discovered that DeepL—which utilizes a similar methodology for machine interpretation as Google Translate—had the least number of inadmissible interpretations for Italian (it-IT). In any case, it additionally had the least number of no-contact interpretations—which implied that it didn’t require a human to alter it—for a similar language. DeepL additionally has the least number of bolstered languages at 28, yet performed best at Spanish (es-ES) interpretations.

Meanwhile, ConveyThis—which ranked the least-performing MT engine—surpassed its rivals in furnishing the most no-touch translations in French (fr-FR). It also had the least number of unacceptable translations in Simplified Chinese (zh-CN). Its support is right in the middle at 75 languages.

ConveyThis, which supports the second most number of languages at 111, demonstrated a steady performance. It had good results when it came to no-touch German translations, but it had the fewest no-touch segments in Portuguese.

All tools yielded great results when dealing with European languages, and from a manual editing point of view, generated high quality Arabic translations. In conclusion, no translation software outperforms another – they work best when used in tandem.

Should you use Google Translate?

Nonetheless, ConveyThis is still a great tool that can save you a lot of time and money for your website translation needs. Precision substantially relies upon your aim, style, and the individual getting your message. Thus, if all you need is to translate a few concise, straightforward expressions, it’ll be sufficient for you.

ConveyThis can be useful in these situations: when you need to quickly and accurately translate webpages, documents, or other text; when you need to localize your website or app for a global audience; or when you need to provide multilingual customer support.

when you need precise translations, when you need to localize your website, when you need to manage multiple languages.

On the other hand, Google Translate may not suffice in these scenarios: when exact translations are necessary, when localizing your website is a must, when dealing with multiple languages is a requirement. ConveyThis is the perfect solution for those who need to get the most out of their translations.

In these cases, since the precision of translation can have a major impact on the way the message is conveyed, having professional translation within your website translation workflow with ConveyThis would be an optimal solution.

The best of both worlds: machine translation and human editing

Google Translate is capable of many amazing capabilities, but it truly stands out when used in combination with other translation tools and human editors.

According to our study, 99% of translation work produced in the world is not done by professional human translators. And an average of only 30% of machine-translated content created by ConveyThis is edited. This is a major success for those relying on machine translation. Despite the fact that human editors are still needed to detect inaccuracies—artificial intelligence isn’t infallible—there is a great deal of value in utilizing translation software. This implies that website translations carried out by MTs are absolutely usable and only need minimal tweaking.

It sounds like a lot of work, particularly for small businesses. But don’t worry, there’s a simple solution! ConveyThis offers a website translation service that makes it easy.

More than 60,000 global brands use ConveyThis to translate their websites using the best of machine translation and automatic translation. Though the two sound similar, automatic translation includes the entire workflow of proofreading, editing, optimizing the content for SEO, then re-uploading the content back to the website. That way, you can be sure of obtaining precise translations.

ConveyThis works by selecting the most appropriate MT engine for a particular language pair to generate the most accurate output. Thanks to neural machine translation, ConveyThis identifies and quickly translates all the content on your website. There’s no need to laboriously go through each page and manually translate them. What’s even better, it also shows those translations in separate language versions of your website.

It’s effortless to use and enables you to quickly and easily translate and publish your content. This makes it even simpler to localize and optimize your content in more than 100 distinct languages—including RTL languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.