<P> Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service , it used United Nations and European Parliament transcripts to gather linguistic data . Rather than translating languages directly , it first translates text to English and then to the target language . During a translation , it looks for patterns in millions of documents to help decide on the best translation . Its accuracy has been criticized and ridiculed on several occasions . In November 2016 , Google announced that Google Translate would switch to a neural machine translation engine - Google Neural Machine Translation ( GNMT ) - which translates `` whole sentences at a time , rather than just piece by piece . It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation , which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar '' . Originally only enabled for a few languages in 2016 , GNMT is gradually being used for more languages . </P>
<P> Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service , it used United Nations and European Parliament transcripts to gather linguistic data . Rather than translating languages directly , it first translates text to English and then to the target language . During a translation , it looks for patterns in millions of documents to help decide on the best translation . Its accuracy has been criticized and ridiculed on several occasions . In November 2016 , Google announced that Google Translate would switch to a neural machine translation engine - Google Neural Machine Translation ( GNMT ) - which translates `` whole sentences at a time , rather than just piece by piece . It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation , which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar '' . Originally only enabled for a few languages in 2016 , GNMT is gradually being used for more languages . </P>
when was google translate launched for the first time
when was google translate launched for the first time
April 2006
April 2006