translated Google translate a literary text, there are 0.36 errors per ten words. For business websites it is 0.56 and for everyday expressions even 2.77 errors. This is the conclusion of the company that specializes in online language courses preply, who has translated texts in these three categories from English to German, Italian and Spanish – and vice versa. The results were then compared with the know-how of bilingual language experts.

Preply gives in to the Google software, through the neural translation model “Google Neural Machine Translation” (GNMT) got better and better. However, using Google Translate can still lead to huge misunderstandings, especially in the informal – ie interpersonal – realm. Translation accuracy scores lower in this test category than literary texts or business websites. The reviewers gave the average readability on a scale of one to ten a 6.03 for literary texts, a 7.40 for business websites and a 5.38 for everyday expressions.

It is noticeable that Google Translate does not handle a number of sentences like “broken neck” well. Here, 2.77 errors occur in ten analyzed words. “As an artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Google Translate struggles to understand the uniquely human and emotional nuances needed to translate the meaning of a region-specific phrase into the target language,” concludes Preply.

The tool is best at translating content from other languages ​​into English. Here, the testers found 97 percent accuracy, but criticized readability: In terms of accuracy and clarity, Google Translate lagged behind the performance of human translators. However, translating informal English into other languages ​​proved to be the most difficult, with an accuracy of only 72 percent.

Google Translate learns by accessing multilingual content from the web. Since English is one of the most widely spoken and written languages ​​in the world, the tool has access to more English documents than any other language. This puts Google Translate close to native English speakers who are adept at translating other languages ​​into their own.

Since Spanish is also one of the most widely spoken languages ​​on the planet, it’s not surprising that Google Translate produces the second best results here. The tool has a much harder time with Italian and German, according to Preply it is not a reliable tool to translate these languages. With 0.59 errors per ten words analyzed, Italian is the most difficult for Google to translate. With 0.54 translation errors, German doesn’t do much better. (ss)