Google Translate and DeepL: How do they work?
If you’ve ever needed to quickly translate a text online, you’ve likely tried Google Translate or another free alternative. For non-professionals, these tools can be lifesavers to get at least the basic idea of a text in another language. The results range from acceptable to ludicrous, but the process feels like magic. So how do these machines actually work? Google Translate initially used statistical machine translation, like many machine translation (MT) products at the time. Starting in 2016, all of these MT services began to shift to neural machine translation, which is now the most common technology for consumers. A new neural translator launched in 2017, DeepL, has also grown in popularity. But how exactly does machine translation work? We…