字幕听写：
Google Translate is a free tool that enables you to translate sentences, documents and even whole websites instantly. But how exactly does it work? While it may seem like we have a room full of bilingual elves working for us, in fact all of our translations come from computers. These computers use a process called “statistical machine translation” -- which is just a fancy way to say that our computers generate translations based on patterns found in large amounts of text. But let’s take a step back. If you want to teach someone a new language you might start by teaching them vocabulary words and grammatical rules that explain how to construct sentences. A computer can learn a foreign language the same way - by referring to vocabulary and a set of rules. But languages are complicated and, as any language learner can tell you, there are exceptions to almost any rule. When you try to capture all of these exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions, in a computer program, the translation quality begins to break down. Google Translate takes a different approach. Instead of trying to teach our computers all the rules of a language, we let our computers discover the rules for themselves. They do this by analyzing millions and millions of documents that have already been translated by human translators. These translated texts come from books, organizations like the UN and websites from all around the world. Our computers scan these texts looking for statistically significant patterns--that is to say, patterns between the translation and the original text that are unlikely to occur by chance. Once the computer finds a pattern, it can use this pattern to translate similar texts in the future. When you repeat this process billions of times you end up with billions of patterns and one very smart computer program. For some languages however we have fewer translated documents available and therefore fewer patterns that our software has detected. This is why our translation quality will vary by language and language pair. We know our translations aren’t always perfect but by constantly providing new translated texts we can make our computers smarter and our translations better. So next time you translate a sentence or webpage with Google Translate, think about those millions of documents and billions of patterns that ultimately led to your translation - and all of it happening in the blink of an eye. Pretty cool, isn’t it? Give it a try at translate.google.com.
（译文）Google Translate是一个能够帮助你立刻翻译句子、文件甚至整个网站的免费工具。但是它究竟是怎样工作的呢？虽然看起来似乎有一屋子的双语小精灵在为我们工作，但事实上我们所有的翻译结果都来自电脑。这些电脑使用了一个名为“统计机器翻译”的程序，这只不过是一个好听的说法，意思是电脑是基于在大量语篇中找到的各种模式来得到翻译结果的。但是，我们退后一步讲。如果你想教会别人一种新的语言，你可能会首先教会他词汇和用以解释如何构造句子的语法规则。电脑也是通过同样的方式—通过参考词汇和一系列的规则—来学会一门外语的。但是语言极其复杂，而且正如每个语言学习所能告诉你的那样，所有规则都有例外。当你试图在一个电脑程序中包含所有的特例以及特例中的特例时，翻译结果的质量就开始下滑了。Google Translate采取了一种不同的方法。我们并不教给电脑所有的语言规则，而是让电脑自己去发现这些规则。电脑通过分析经过人工翻译的数以千万计的文件来发现其中的规则。这些翻译结果源自图书、各种机构（如联合国）以及世界各地的网站。我们的电脑会扫描这些语篇，从中寻找在统计学上非常重要的模式——即翻译结果和原文之间并非偶然产生的模式。一旦电脑找到了这些模式，今后它就能使用这些模式来翻译其它类似的语篇。当你数十亿次重复使用这个过程时，你就会得出数十亿种模式以及一个异常聪明的电脑程序。但是对于某些语言来说，我们能够使用到的已翻译完成的语篇非常少，因此我们的软件所探测到的模式就相对很少。这就是为什么我们的翻译质量会因语言对的不同而不同。我们知道，我们的翻译结果并不总是完美的，但是通过不断向电脑提供新的翻译语篇，我们就能让电脑更加聪明，翻译结果更加准确。所以，当你下一次使用Google Translate来翻译一个句子或一个网页时，可以想象一下那些最终帮助你获得翻译结果的数以百万计的文件和数以亿计的模式——而且所有的这一切都发生在眨眼的一瞬。非常酷，不是吗？现在就去translate.google.com去尝试一下吧！（Alex Han译）