Google announces Neural Machine Translation to improve Google Translate

Google has announced a neural machine translation (NMT) system that it says will reduce translation errors across its Google Translate service by between 55 percent and 85 percent, calling the achievement by its team of scientists a "significant milestone". Announced on the 10-year anniversary of Google Translate, Google Brain Team research scientists Quoc Le and Mike Schuster said Google has used machine intelligence to improve its image and speech-recognition systems, but had previously found it "challenging" to improve machine translation until now. "Ten years ago, we announced the launch of Google Translate, together with the use of Phrase-Based Machine Translation as the key algorithm behind this service," they said. "Today, we announce the Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT), which utilizes state-of-the-art training techniques to achieve the largest improvements to date for machine translation quality." Unlike the currently used phrase-based machine translation (PBMT) system -- which translates words and phrases independently within a sentence, and is notorious for its mistranslations -- neural machine translation considers the entire sentence as one unit to be translated.