Google Translate Gets a Deep-Learning Upgrade

Google Translate has become a quick-and-dirty translation solution for millions of people worldwide since it debuted a decade ago. But Google's engineers have been quietly tweaking their machine translation service's algorithms behind the scenes. They recently delivered a huge Google Translate upgrade that harnesses the popular artificial intelligence technique known as deep learning. Machine translation services such as Google Translate have mostly used a "phrase-based" approach of breaking down sentences into words and phrases to be independently translated. But several years ago, Google began experimenting with a deep-learning technique, called neural machine translation, that can translate entire sentences without breaking them down into smaller components.