Google Translate: Much-improved for Arabic

The next time you use Google Translate, you might notice that the translation is more accurate and easier to understand. That’s because the words and sentences you translate between English and Arabic are now using our cutting-edge “neural translation” technology!

Neural translation is a lot better than our old phrase-based system, because we translate whole sentences at a time, instead of pieces of a sentence. (Of course there’s lots of cool machine learning that makes this all work, which we explain on our Research blog.) This makes for translations that are usually more accurate and sound closer to how people speak the language, especially when you translate a whole sentence. Here’s one example showing how much better the new Google Translate is:

You’ll get these new translations automatically in most places Google Translate is available: in the iOS and Android apps, and through Google Search. It will soon also be available for automatic page translations in Chrome. Arabic joins a number of other languages that have now been upgraded to neural translation. We’d like to especially thank the thousands of Arabic speakers who’ve pitched in. Every contribution from people like you to Translate Community helps us to keep improving!