Google Translate

What is Google Translate?

Google Translate is the most widely used translation service in the world, with more than 500 million active users daily. It supports 133 languages and offers translation via text, speech, handwriting, photos and documents. Google Translate is completely free via the browser, mobile app and as an API for developers.

How does Google Translate work?

Google Translate switched in 2016 from statistical machine translation to a neural network model (Google Neural Machine Translation). This model translates entire sentences at once instead of word by word, resulting in more fluent and context-aware translations.

For the most popular language combinations — especially languages with a lot of training data such as English, Spanish, French and German — the quality is excellent. For less common languages, Google Translate is often the only available option.

Core features

• 133 languages — the broadest language support of all translation services
• Camera translation — point camera at text and see the translation in real time
• Spoken translation — speak in your language, hear the translation
• Document translation — upload PDF, Word or PowerPoint
• Website translation — translate entire web pages
• Offline translation — download language files for use without internet

Comparison with DeepL

For European languages, DeepL scores higher on quality than Google Translate. But Google Translate has 133 languages versus DeepL's 31. For Asian languages, Arabic and less common languages, Google Translate is clearly better. Camera translation and offline use are also unique to Google Translate.

Advantages

• Completely free, no subscription needed
• The most supported languages of all translation services
• Camera and offline translation

Disadvantages

• Lower quality than DeepL for European languages
• Privacy: translations are stored by Google

Who is it for?

Google Translate is for anyone who wants to translate quickly and for free — especially for non-European languages, camera translation while traveling, or languages that DeepL does not support.