Through Sheer Power, Google Translate Gets It Right

Score one for Google’s “don’t be evil” side as Web surfers reap the benefits of its excellent translation program—thanks to the sheer force of Google's web dominance. Machine translation is a particularly tricky computer problem that programmers now agree is most easily solved by feeding massive amounts of data into a computer. And Google, with its interconnected servers, has arguably the largest one in the world.

The company mines UN and EU translations to provide a massive pool of references, and helps speakers of less common languages get their text on the Web so it can be used as well. The result is a sort of crowd-sourced database that produces free translations on par with more traditional efforts by the likes of IBM and Microsoft. “Our infrastructure is very well-suited to this,” an exec tells the New York Times. “We can take approaches that others can’t even dream of.” (More Google Translate stories.)