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Catapult is not responsible for any of the translations provided by or created from use of Google Translate. Catapult, including all of its officers, agents, servants and employees and appointed or elected officials, past, present and future, makes no warranty and assumes no legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information provided by Google Translate. The link to Google Translate is provided as a convenience only, and such linkage does not imply any type of association, sponsorship of or endorsement of Google Translate.

The following content was derived from the Google Translate FAQ web page, and is property of Google:

Frequently Asked Questions

What is "automatic translation"?

It's translation produced by state-of-the-art technology, without the intervention of human translators. Automatic translation is also often referred to as machine translation.

Has Google developed its own translation software?

Yes. Google's research group has developed its own statistical translation system for the language pairs now available on Google Translate.

What is statistical machine translation?

Most state-of-the-art, commercial machine-translation systems in use today have been developed using a rule-based approach, and require a lot of work to define vocabularies and grammars.

Our system takes a different approach: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We've achieved very good results in research evaluations.

The translation quality isn't as good as I'd like it to be. Can you make it more accurate?

We're constantly working on it. Even today's most sophisticated software, however, doesn't approach the fluency of a native speaker or possess the skill of a professional translator. Automatic translation is very difficult, as the meaning of words depends on the context in which they're used. While we are working on the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer human quality translations. In the interim, we hope you find the service we provide useful for most purposes.

Also, in order to improve quality, we need large amounts of bilingual text. If you have large amounts of bilingual or multilingual texts you'd like to contribute, please let us know.

How do I provide feedback to Google?

You can provide us feedback when translating text by clicking the "Suggest a better translation" link or when translating web pages by hovering over the translated text (to display the original text tooltip) and clicking the "Suggest a better translation" link.

How will Google use my feedback?

We'll use your feedback to improve translation quality in future updates to the language pairs we've developed.

I still have questions. Where can I go for more information?

Check out the Google Translate discussion group.