Translate the web easily with Google Translate

Google Translate is a free statistical machine translation service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, document or webpage, into another language.

The service was introduced in April 28, 2006 for the Arabic language.[1] Prior to October 2007, for languages other than Arabic, Chinese and Russian, Google used a SYSTRAN based translator[2][3] which is used by other translation services such as Babel Fish, AOL, and Yahoo.

On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the Google Translate API had been deprecated and that it would cease functioning on December 1, 2011 "due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse."[4][5] The shutting down of the API, which is used by a number of websites, has led to criticism of Google and developers questioning the viability of using Google APIs in their products.[6][7]

On June 3, 2011, Google announced that they were canceling their plan to terminate the Translate API due to public pressure. In the same announcement, Google said that they will release a paid version of the Translate API. [4][8]
Features and limitations

The service limits the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, that will be translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language.[9] For some languages, users are asked for alternate translations such as for technical terms, to be included for future updates to the translation process. Text in a foreign language can be typed, and if "Detect Language" is selected, it will not only detect the language but also translate it into English by default.

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations. Some languages produce better results than others. As of 2010, French to English translation is very good;[10][dead link] however, rule-based machine translations perform better if the text to be translated is shorter; this effect is particularly evident in Chinese to English translations.[10][dead link]

Texts written in the Greek, Devanagari, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts can be transliterated automatically from phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet.
[edit] Browser integration

A number of Firefox extensions exist for Google services, and likewise for Google Translate, which allow right-click command access to the translation service.[11]

An extension for Google's Chrome browser also exists;[12] in February 2010, Google translate was integrated into the standard Google Chrome browser for automatic webpage translation.