Google Translate turns 10

Google Translate - a free service that instantly translates words, phrases and web pages between English and over 100 other languages -- turned 10 on Friday.

"Our goal was to break language barriers and to make the world more accessible. Since then, we have grown from supporting two languages to 103 and from hundreds of users to hundreds of millions," Barak Turovsky, product lead of Google Translate, posted on Google's official blog.

Google Translate currently supports nine of India's 22 official languages. Voice search in Hindi and seven other Indian languages were launched in June 2014.

Visual translation from English to Hindi was added in July 2015. Sindhi was added to the mix earlier this year. Google made it possible to do a bilingual conversation on Translate.

In its journey of 10 years, Google Translate has helped people make connections by translation.

Turovsky said more than 500 million users were using Google Translate. The most common translations are between English and Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese and Indonesian.

The company is translating more than 100 billion words a day. In addition to common phrases like "I love you," people are looking for translations related to current events and trends.

The Word Lens -- a feature that can instantly translates words into 28 languages -- is letting people read menus, street signs and more.

Source: IANS