Google Translate adds 11 new languages: Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Google's machine translation service now supports 35 languages and you can use it to translate text between any combination of languages. In most cases, Google uses English as an intermediary language, so when you translate a text from Indonesian to Vietnamese, Google translates the text to English and then it translates the result to Vietnamese. You'll get the best results when one of the languages is English, since Google needs a single translation.
Google developed its own translation technology. Google feed the system with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. Then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model.
One of the advantages of this approach is scalability: if Google finds enough parallel text to create a good translation model for a language, it will be added to Google Translate. Microsoft followed suit and Windows Live Translator switched from Systran to Microsoft's machine translation system.
