Google Translate Just Got 60% Better By Working on Whole Sentences

If you are translating text or speech, it seems obvious that you should read a whole sentence before figuring out what it means. But this hasn't been so easy for computers--in part because the work sucks up so many resources. So Google Translate has had to get by with looking at pieces of sentences, words, and phrases, and translating them individually. On Tuesday, Google announced a new system called Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) that works on whole sentences and improves accuracy about 60% on average over the old phrase-based machine translation (PBMT), including on notoriously difficult Chinese-to-English translations. This is the first translation to roll out to the Google Translate mobile and web apps, available now.