<Tr> <Th> Current status </Th> <Td> Active </Td> </Tr> <P> Google Translate is a free multilingual machine translation service developed by Google, to translate text, speech, images, sites, or real - time video from one language into another . It offers a website interface, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications . Google Translate supports over 100 languages at various levels and as of May 2013, serves over 200 million people daily . </P> <P> Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service, it used United Nations and European Parliament transcripts to gather linguistic data . Rather than translating languages directly, it first translates text to English and then to the target language . During a translation, it looks for patterns in millions of documents to help decide on the best translation . Its accuracy has been criticized and ridiculed on several occasions . In November 2016, Google announced that Google Translate would switch to a neural machine translation engine - Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) - which translates "whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by piece . It uses this broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar". Originally only enabled for a few languages in 2016, GNMT is gradually being used for more languages . </P> <P> Google Translate can translate multiple forms of text and media, including text, speech, images, sites, or real - time video, from one language to another . It supports over 100 languages at various levels and as of May 2013, serves over 200 million people daily . For some languages, Google Translate can pronounce translated text, highlight corresponding words and phrases in the source and target text, and act as a simple dictionary for single - word input . If "Detect language" is selected, text in an unknown language can be automatically identified . If a user enters a URL in the source text, Google Translate will produce a hyperlink to a machine translation of the website . Users can save translations in a "phrasebook" for later use . For some languages, text can be entered via an on - screen keyboard, through handwriting recognition, or speech recognition . </P>

When was google translate launched for the first time