OREANDA-NEWS. March 16, 2011. Yandex has launched Yandex.Translate, an online translation service based on proprietary machine translation technology. The service translates text or web pages in Russian into English or Ukrainian. Conversely, text and web pages in English or Ukrainian can be translated into Russian.

Yandex’s machine translation technology is statistical. It builds special-purpose dictionaries based on analyses of millions of documents - originals and translations. When translating text, the system picks the most statistically probable translation in a given context. To read more about Yandex’s machine translation technology, visit this page.

“Statistical machine translation, of course, cannot compare with human translation, especially professionally done”, says Aleksey Baytin, head of Yandex.Translate. “But, more often than not, all a user needs is just a general idea of what other people think of a hotel abroad or how a certain event is covered in the foreign media. An online translator can easily help with that. And do that in a matter of seconds”.

Currently, the Yandex.Translate service is available as a public beta version. The Yandex team are continuously working on the quality of translation, processing time and range of languages the service can process.