Google Translate just got a lot smarter

Google says its Translate app now spits back more natural translations. Google said Tuesday that it has vastly improved its Google Translate app, available on phones and the web. The search giant said it's now incorporating "neural machine translation" into the software, which translates whole sentences at a time, instead of breaking the text down to smaller chunks and translating those pieces. That means translations come out more natural, with better syntax and grammar. "It has improved more in one single leap than in 10 years combined," said Barak Turovsky, the product lead for Google Translate, during a press event at Google's San Francisco office. The new translation system is coming to eight of the 103 languages supported by the app.