OREANDA-NEWS. December 11, 2012. Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX), one of the largest European internet companies operating Russia’s most popular search engine and most visited website, has launched a free translation app for iPhone. Yandex.Translate is an instant translation assistant helping users to translate words, sentences and entire texts between Russian and eight European languages. The Yandex.Translate app is based on Yandex’s proprietary machine translation technology first implemented in the company’s online translation service at translate.yandex.ru.

Yandex.Translate continually updates its vocabulary and offers accurate translations even for those words that aren’t yet registered in any standard dictionary. Instead of using sets of rules and word databases, the company’s statistics-based translation system relies on natural language. Yandex’s automated translation technology learns its skills by analysing billions of web pages and comparing parallel texts in different languages it finds online. The system goes through enormous amounts of text on a daily basis and registers new words faster than any linguist. The company’s statistical machine translation technology keeps track of which words co-occur more often than others and uses this knowledge to generate natural translations.

The Yandex.Translate app translates individual words, as well as texts of up to 10,000 characters long, which makes it a perfect tool for reading a short newspaper article on the way to work, as well as for sending a quick email to a foreign colleague. The mobile translator also features predictive typing, which allows users to enter text at one click and instantly receive translation. Yandex.Translate also offers translations synchronously with the input – right as the user is typing the text. An internet connection is required to use the app, but translation history can be accessed while offline.