Google Translate is a service provided by Google Inc. (Google) to translate a section of text, or a webpage, into another language. The service limits the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, that will be translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language. For some languages, users are asked for alternate translations such as for technical terms, to be included for future updates to the translation process. Text in a foreign language can be typed, and if "Detect Language" is selected, it will not only detect the language, but it will translate into English by default.

Unlike other translation services such as Babel Fish (Babel Fish (website)), AOL, and Yahoo (Yahoo!) which use SYSTRAN, Google uses its own translation software.

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations. Some languages produce better results than others.Factdate=January 2009

It does not apply grammatical (Grammar) rules, since its algorithms are based on statistical analysis rather than traditional rule-based analysis.

Languages written in Devanagari, Cyrillic script, or the Arabic script and its variants can be transliterated automatically from phonetic equivalents written in the Latin alphabet.