Good question… I know that Google Translate began as a pretty bad outsourced translator (SYSTRAN) because I had a lot of trouble figuring out when Translate first came out for my Google survival analysis, and it began being upgraded and expanded almost constantly from ~2002 onwards. The 2007 switch was supposedly from the company SYSTRAN to an internal system, but what does that mean? SYSTRAN is a proprietary company which could be using anything it wants internally, and admits it’s a hybrid system. The 2006 beta just calls it statistics and machine learning, with no details about what this means. Google Scholar’s no help here either—hits are swamped by research papers mentioning Translate, and a few more recent hits about the neural networks used in various recent Google mobile-oriented services like speech or image recognition.
So… I have no idea. Highly unlikely to predate their internal translator in 2006, anyway, but could be your 2012 date.
Good question… I know that Google Translate began as a pretty bad outsourced translator (SYSTRAN) because I had a lot of trouble figuring out when Translate first came out for my Google survival analysis, and it began being upgraded and expanded almost constantly from ~2002 onwards. The 2007 switch was supposedly from the company SYSTRAN to an internal system, but what does that mean? SYSTRAN is a proprietary company which could be using anything it wants internally, and admits it’s a hybrid system. The 2006 beta just calls it statistics and machine learning, with no details about what this means. Google Scholar’s no help here either—hits are swamped by research papers mentioning Translate, and a few more recent hits about the neural networks used in various recent Google mobile-oriented services like speech or image recognition.
So… I have no idea. Highly unlikely to predate their internal translator in 2006, anyway, but could be your 2012 date.
Here is a 2007 paper that I found when I was writing the above. I don’t remember how I found it, or why I think it representative, though.