Google Translate celebrates its 20th anniversary: 1 billion monthly active users translate 1 trillion words per month, with "thank you" being the most frequently translated word.

According to AIMPACT, on April 29th (UTC+8), as monitored by Beating, Google Translate celebrated its 20th anniversary. From a statistical machine learning experiment in 2006, it has grown into a global translation tool supporting approximately 250 languages and over 60,000 language pairs, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Google disclosed that Translate, Search, Lens, and Circle to Search collectively process approximately 1 trillion words per month, enough to read for 12,000 years if read aloud continuously. A new feature added for the 20th anniversary is pronunciation practice: the Android version of the Translate app now features an AI pronunciation correction tool. Users speak a foreign language into their phones, and the AI analyzes and provides pronunciation feedback in real time. Currently, it supports English, Spanish, and Hindi, and is only available in the US and India. Previously, the Translate app launched Gemini-powered Live Translate, which translates conversations in real time using headphones, preserving the speaker's original tone and rhythm. More than one-third of Live Translate conversations last over 5 minutes. About one-third of mobile users use translation apps as language learning tools, and nearly half of the weekly active users of the Practice function are practicing their spoken English. The most frequently translated language pairs are English to Spanish, followed by English to Indonesian, Portuguese, Arabic, and Turkish. English to Hindi, Bengali, and Malayalam, three Indian languages, also rank highly. The most frequently translated phrase over the past 20 years has consistently been "Thank you," followed by "How are you?", "I love you," "Hello," and "Please." (Source: ME)