Lately, it has seemed Google Translate’s translations from French to English have been pretty good about 90 percent of the time. I wasn’t sure if the translation methodology had improved or if I was becoming more tolerant of odd phrasing.
Apparently, it wasn’t my imagination. Google Translate has been getting better since the technology was first introduced ten years ago.
The reason for the improvement is because Google Translate introduced neural machine translation for eight languages, including English, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian.
Neural translation is a lot better than Google Translate’s previous technology because it translates whole sentences, instead of parts of a sentence. According to the developer, “This makes for translations that are usually more accurate and sound closer to the way people speak the language.”
Of course, when using Google Translate to translate documents and websites for your genealogy research, always compare the original to the translation. For example, the Marguerite, a ship travelling from France to New France in 1647 becomes Daisy when translated from French to English by Google Translate.
You will find the technical details about neural translation on the Research Blog.
To learn more about using Google Translate, read my blog post, How to easily translate a French website into English.
