Google Translate Eats One Million Books A Day

I don’t think there’s an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for translations per day, but that hasn’t stopped Google from going for it anyway. In a recent post on the official Google Translate blog, the search engine and ad-serving juggernaut was happy to highlight some of the service’s statistics.

  • “In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you’d find in 1 million books” — I wonder if there is a record of the most often translated phrases? Probably, but we’ll likely never see it.
  • “200 million monthly active users on translate.google.com” — doesn’t including apps and other avenues to the service.
  • “92 percent of our traffic comes from outside the United States” — Uh, cool?

Google Translate wasn’t always the speedster it is now — the post mentions that before 2006, “it took us 40 hours and 1000 machines to translate 1000 sentences”. Definitely not enough to handle the workload of a live service.

As long as machine translations continue to bring us humorous goodies like Backstroke Of The West, they’re alright by me.

[Google Translate blog, via The Atlantic]

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