Google adds Neural Machine technology to translate

NEW DELHI: In order to further enhance its ability to translate content into Indian local languages, Google has introduced its new Neural Machine Translation technology to translate between English and nine widely used Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali and Tamil among others.

The US based tech gaint claims that the neural translation offers a huge improvement over the old phrase-based system, translating full sentences at a time, instead of pieces of a sentence. "This change improves the quality of translation in a single jump than seen in the last ten years combined," the company said.

The Neural Machine Translation feature will also be extended to Chrome browser's built-in Auto-Translate functionality to web content. The new translation capability will also be available to users on Google search and Maps, both on mobile and desktop.

Rajan Anandan, VP, India & South East Asia, Google, said: "The most important aspect of making the web more useful and meaningful for all of India is to make India's Internet more representative of the India we live in. India today has 234 million Indian Language users who're online, compared to 175 Million english web users, we expect another 300 million Indian language users to come online in the next four years."

He added that with the launch of neural machine translation, Google is taking a huge step forward to bring down the barriers that stop Indian language users to get more out of the Internet and also help the Industry to solve for the needs of billion Indians.

Google also launched a report titled 'Indian Languages - Defining India’s Internet' joinly prepared by Google and KPMG India.

Google also rolled out new Gboard -- keyboard for Android launched in December 2016 with transliteration support for Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, and Gujarati -- extending support to cover all 22 Indian languages.