---GOOGLE TRANSLATE---

Google Translate is a free statistically-based machine translation service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, document or webpage, into another language.
The service was introduced in 2007. Prior to that Google used a SYSTRAN based translator which is used by other translation services such as Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo.

 Features and limitations
The service limits the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, that will be translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language. For some languages, users are asked for alternate translations such as for technical terms, to be included for future updates to the translation process. Text in a foreign language can be typed, and if "Detect Language" is selected, it will not only detect the language, but it will translate into English by default.

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations. Some languages produce better results than others. As of 2010, French to English translation is very good, however rules based translators perform better as the length of text to be translated becomes shorter; this effect is particularly evident in Chinese to English translations.

Texts written in the Greek, Devanagari, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts can be transliterated automatically from phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet.

Browser integration
A number of Firefox extensions exist for Google services, and likewise for Google Translate, which allow right-click command access to the translation service.
An extension for Google's Chrome browser also exists[5]; in February 2010 Google translate was integrated into the standard Google Chrome browser for automatic webpage translation.

 Language options
(by chronological order of introduction)

1st stage
English to French
English to German
English to Spanish
French to English
German to English
Spanish to English

2nd stage

english to Portuguese
English to Dutch
Portuguese to English
Dutch to English

3rd stage

English to Italian
Italian to English 

4th stage
English to Chinese (Simplified)
English to Japanese
English to Korean
Chinese (Simplified) to English
Japanese to English
Korean to English 

5th stage (launched December 2006)
English to Russian
Russian to English 

6th stage (launched April 2007)
English to Arabic
Arabic to English 

7th stage (launched February 2007)
English to Chinese (Traditional)
Chinese (Simplified to Traditional)
Chinese (Traditional) to English
Chinese (Traditional to Simplified)

8th stage (launched October 2007)

all 25 language pairs use Google's machine translation system

 9th stage
English to Hindi
Hindi to English

10th stage 

(as of this stage, translation can be done between any two languages, going through English, if needed) (launched May 2008)
Bulgarian          Croatian
Czech                 Danish
Finnish              Norwegian
Polish                Romanian
Swedish

11th stage (launched September 25, 2008)
Catalan              Filipino
Hebrew             Indonesian
Latvian              Lithuanian
Serbian             Slovak
Slovene            Ukrainian
Vietnamese

12th stage (launched January 30, 2009)
Albanian         Estonian
Galician           Hungarian
Maltese           Thai
Turkish

13th stage (launched June 19, 2009)
Persian

 14th stage (launched August 24, 2009)
Afrikaans           Belarusian
Icelandic            Irish
Macedonian     Malay
Swahili               Welsh
Yiddish             

15th stage (launched November 19, 2009)
The Beta stage is finished. Users can now choose to have the romanization written for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Greek, Hindi and Thai. For translations from Arabic, Persian and Hindi, the user can enter a Latin transliteration of the text and the text will be translated to the native script for these languages as the user is writing. The text can now be read by a text-to-speech program in English, Italian, French and German

16th stage (launched January 30, 2010)
Haitian Creole

17th stage (launched April 2010)
Speech program launched in Hindi and Spanish

18th stage (launched May 5, 2010)
Speech program launched in Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh (based in eSpeak).

19th stage (launched May 13, 2010)
Armenian         Azerbaijani
Basque              Georgian
Urdu

 20th stage (launched June 2010)
Provides romanization for Arabic.

21th stage (launched September 2010)
Allows phonetic typing for Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Serbian and Urdu.

Translation methodology
It does not apply grammatical rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis.
Google translate is based on an approach called statistical machine translation, and more specifically, on research by Franz-Josef Och who won the DARPA contest for speed machine translation in 2003. Och is now the head of Google's machine translation department.
According to Och, a solid base for developing a usable statistical machine translation system for a new pair of languages from scratch, would consist in having a bilingual text corpus (or parallel collection) of more than a million words and two monolingual corpora of each more than a billion words. Statistical models from this data are then used to translate between those languages.
To acquire this huge amount of linguistic data, Google used United Nations documents. The same document is normally available in all six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish), so Google now has a 6-language corpus of 20 billion words' worth of human translations.
The availability of Arabic and Chinese as official UN languages is probably one of the reasons why Google Translate initially focused on the development of translation between English and those languages, and not, for example, Japanese and German, which are not official languages at the UN.
Google representatives have been very active at domestic conferences in Japan in the field asking researchers to provide them with bilingual corpora.

Translation mistakes and oddities
Because Google Translate uses statistical matching to translate rather than a dictionary/grammar rules approach translated text can often include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors, often swapping common terms for similar but nonequivalent common terms in the other language, as well as inverting sentence meaning.