Google launches its AI-driven Translation Hub as a cloud service

"Each department had spent their own budget on a translation provider," Nathan says. "And they build and retain what is called its translation memory," meaning all the intelligence and experience accumulated from translating Avery documents (e.g., with the right word choice, technical terms, and tone). But all that knowledge was mostly stored in human brains, some of them outside the company. "If the translation provider had a person exiting [and] they brought in a new person, that's going to affect the quality of translations," Nathan says, noting that in the time Avery Dennison has used the Translation Hub (aided by some specialized language models trained on Avery-specific lingo) he's seen a 90% reduction in the company's translation costs. Google Translate launched in 2006 and was a purely consumer-facing product for a good six years. By 2012 Google realized that companies were trying to use the product for business documents, so it created an application programming interface (API) for the service.