Language is a beautiful thing. Yet, for some, there are large barriers to speaking with natives in other countries. Google Translate has made some strides in overcoming those obstacles in recent years and has always been useful to me as I learn other languages. It's because it is more than just a simple dictionary. So the news announced today that Translate is becoming more powerful and useful with what Google calls Neural Machine Translation is exciting.

Usually, translated sentences are not always perfect, but they get close enough to be understandable for the native speaker. The reason for the weirdness is that Translate would look at pieces of the sentences, instead of the whole statement, and go from there. When we speak to each other, context is extremely important. With this new technique from Google, the Neural system will analyze the entire sentence to find the broader context so as to provide the best and most relevant translation. From here, it adapts to sound more like a person speaking with proper grammar.

Eight languages are supported right now: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish. The plan is to implement all remaining forms of communication that you can find in Translate. As a hobbyist linguist, I am quite excited by this news and hope that it expands to the other languages very soon.