How Accurate is Google Translate?

Is Google Translate accurate enough to count on for your business?

Easy. Instant. Free. These are some of the reasons Google Translate is one of the most popular translation tools. It definitely comes to the rescue when you’re trying to navigate a foreign country.

But, it can be unreliable for translating complex sentences for one main reason: it isn’t advanced enough to factor in all kinds of nuance and context. Still, it begs the question: how accurate is Google Translate? And can you depend on it for your website translation needs?

How Does Google Translate Work?

Google Translate learns from huge volumes of already-translated text. It leans heavily on the Europarl Corpus – documents from European Parliament proceedings translated by humans – plus other digital resources and common translations for each language.

When it first launched in 2006, it used statistical machine translation to provide instant translated text. But, it soon became clear that this wasn’t going to work in the long term. Since it translated individual words, it worked most efficiently for brief phrases. But it began to offer odd translations for longer, complex sentences. 

Google knew they needed to swap Machine Translation (MT) technologies to improve its accuracy. 10 years later, in 2016, the company developed its own framework, Google Neural Machine Translation Technology (GNMT). The move made leaps and bounds in its algorithm and changed its approach to translation. Instead of translating each word, it looked at the meaning of the entire sentence.

The result? Translations that were much more faithful, even factoring in slang and colloquialisms. The change was massive: it cut translation errors by more than 55%-85% across many major language pairs. 

With this new learning system, Google Translate stopped using English as a go-between for translating any language. Instead, it directly translated between two languages. That means it translated from French to Japanese instead of French to English, then to Japanese. By leaving out the middleman, it worked faster, more efficiently, and most importantly, more precisely.

Is Google Translate Accurate?

Google Translate is accurate enough to get the gist across, but it’s unreliable for nuance and complex sentences, and its accuracy swings widely by language pair. It’s available in 249 languages, and quality is highest for its most popular pairs. Spanish translations, for instance, are typically over 90% accurate.

In fact, a 2014 study found Google Translate to have only 57.7% accuracy when used to translate complex medical phrases. A 2021 study conducted by the UCLA Medical Center found that Google Translate preserved the overall meaning for 82.5% of the translations. But the accuracy between languages spanned 55% to 94%. 

Sometimes, Google Translate’s precision is shockingly good. Results from our own study on the state of machine translation for website translation showed that 10 out of 14 translation editors were positively surprised by the quality of the translation they were shown. That means machine translation worked better than they expected. 

One thing to keep in mind about the accuracy of Google Translate is that it works best when translating literary text into English. It’s a different story when it comes to informal phrases: it showed a 72% accuracy when converting English casual texts into other languages. That’s why you can end up with weird translations that don’t make sense when trying to render everyday expressions into other languages.

Is Google Translate Reliable for Website Translation?

Of course, efficiency is the name of the game here, and not everyone has the resources to leave thousands of words in the hands of a human translator, nor the time. Which is where machine translation comes in.

Machine translation has come a long way since its beginnings in the 1950s. With the rise of deep learning and Neural Machine Translation (NMT), it’s become more reliable than ever. Still, because it deals with something as fluid as language, it isn’t always perfect.

In our study, one of the translation editors observed that if the MT did not recognize the context for a particular term, it supplied a general translation instead. It produced incorrect translations due to the missing context. However, when enough context was provided, the translation proved to be accurate. But, can’t the same be said for human translation and dealing with text out of context?

The reason for all this is quite simple: Google Translate’s accuracy depends on how much data is available for the target language. Since 50.5% of websites are in English, Google Translate has a lot of input to work with. That’s why it has the highest accuracy for English language pairs. On the other hand, since only 2% of web pages are in Portuguese, Google Translate will have difficulty offering a highly precise Portuguese translation.

Even though a small percentage of websites may be available in a certain language, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a demand for it. 73% of consumers prefer product reviews in their native language when browsing online. If you’re hoping to expand your business across borders, it’s important to cater to native speakers of your target area. Website localization will help you nail your messaging and make sure nothing gets lost in translation.

Essentially, Google Translate is only as good as its users, or at least those who improve its translation quality. However, Google recently discontinued the 'Contribute' feature, where native speakers could provide relevant translation suggestions to improve the platform's accuracy.

While it’s a convenient base for translating your website, it works best when used with other translation tools and, of course, a human eye to look things over. 

It's worth noting as well that with developments in AI search, we've since found that Google translates untranslated sites and serves them under its own proxy URLs, keeping visitors on Google rather than sending them to the original site. Yikes!

Are There More Accurate Translation Tools than Google Translate?

Yes. DeepL, Amazon Translate, and Microsoft Translator all rival Google Translate on accuracy, and for translating an entire website, Weglot is the tool built for the job. Each engine uses AI to learn from huge volumes of existing translations, and each has its own strengths depending on the language pair.

We put the main engines head-to-head in our study comparing the top translation engines. The table below shows how they stack up on languages supported and where each one shone, with “no-touch” meaning a translation good enough to publish without a human edit.

Across the board, every engine handled European languages well and, with a human editor’s eye, produced high-quality Arabic. Each of these tools has real strengths on a given phrase or language pair. Translating a live website accurately, page after page, is a different job.

That’s where Weglot excels. Weglot is a website translation tool that translates your entire site into 110+ languages and displays each version under its own SEO-friendly URL.

Our AI Translation Model – powered by OpenAI and Gemini – learns your brand’s voice and glossary, so translations sound like you from day one, with editing on hand whenever you want to tweak a translation. Choose Weglot for accuracy across a whole website.

Should You Use Google Translate? 

Nonetheless, Google Translate is still a great tool that can save you a lot of time and money for your website translation needs. Accuracy highly depends on your intent, style, and the person receiving your message. So if all you need is to translate a few brief, simple phrases, it’ll serve you just fine. 

Google Translate can be helpful in these instances:

• Editing low-visibility content, like website footers.
• Instructional, repetitive content, such as guiding end-users toward vital information to solve a simple issue.
• Product reviews, since there is a low expectation of high-quality, comprehensive feedback.

On the other hand, Google Translate may not be appropriate in these cases:

• Translating everyday expressions that require more context or may not have a precise equivalent in your target language.
• Using it as a dictionary to translate individual words, as it may offer a different meaning than the one the author intended.
• Translating source text that may not have followed conventional grammatical rules in its own language or has syntax dissimilar to the target language – like Spanish to Korean.
• Translating sarcastic or ironic expressions.

In these cases, since the quality of translation can make or break the message’s tone and delivery, having professional translation within your website translation workflow would certainly be beneficial.

The Best of Both Worlds: AI Translation and Human Editing

Google Translate is capable of many wonderful functions, but it shines best when working with other translation tools and human editors. 

According to our study, 99% of translation work produced in the world is not done by professional human translators. And an average of only 30% of machine-translated content is edited. That’s actually a pretty big win for those looking at using machine translation. Though a human editor is still necessary to catch inaccuracies – artificial intelligence isn’t perfect – there’s a lot of value in using translation software. That means website translations performed by MTs are most definitely usable and require only some tweaking here and there.

It sounds like a lot of work, especially for small businesses. That’s where Weglot makes things easy. Our AI-powered website translation tool translates your entire site into 110+ languages and displays it under SEO-friendly URLs, with editing on hand whenever you want it. More than 110,000 websites use Weglot to go multilingual without the manual work.

It’s intuitive to use and allows you to translate and publish your content right away. So it’s even easier to localize and optimize your content in more than 100 different languages – even RTL ones like Hebrew and Arabic.

Curious about how it works? Try Weglot’s 14-day free trial (no commitment) to see just how easy setting up a multilingual website can be.