Mumbai: Researchers are increasingly striving to help machines translate words from one language to another the way professional translators would. This implies that machines must understand the context of words and sentences, and make sense of idioms, phrases and jokes. However, despite the fact that billions of words are being translated daily by multilingual machine translation services like Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, Systran's Pure Neural Machine Translator, WordLingo, SDL FreeTranslation, China's Baidu, Russia's Yandex or Babel Fish, machines have a long way to go before they can function as fluently as humans do when speaking in, and translating, different tongues. Barak Turovsky, product lead at Google Translate--a free multilingual machine translation service from Google Inc.--understands this dilemma well. "Today, translation by machines can be likened to my five-year-old son speaking Russian. Since I speak fluent Russian, I know the mistakes he makes and how he forms words," he says.

Google just made a major upgrade to its Translate app. The company is now using a new technology called neural machine translation -- which aims to make computer-generated translations more similar to those done by humans -- to power its translations in seven new languages. Google says the update should make translations in those languages much more accurate and easier to understand. The company previously rolled out this technology for Chinese to English translations in September. Now, Google is using the same technology to power translations to and from English in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish.

Google Translate provides a multilingual machine-translation service by automatically translating one written language to another. Google translate is allegedly limited in its accuracy in translation, however. This study investigated the accuracy of Google Chinese-to-English translation from the perspectives of formality and cohesion with two comparisons: Google translation with human expert translation, and Google translation with Chinese source language. The text sample was a collection of 289 spoken and written texts excerpts from the Selected Works of Mao Zedong in both Chinese and English versions. Google translate was used to translate the Chinese texts into English. These texts were analyzed by the automated text analysis tools: the Chinese and English LIWC, and the Chinese and English Coh-Metrix. Results of Pearson correlations on formality and cohesion showed Google English translation was highly correlated with both human English translation and the original Chinese texts.