Google Translate
The most recommended of 4 translation services
Free, handy for everyday text, photos and conversation, and many find it faithful to the original. Critics say it is often crude and trails DeepL on idiomatic output.
Free, handy for everyday text, photos and conversation, and many find it faithful to the original. Critics say it is often crude and trails DeepL on idiomatic output.
130 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 64
- criticize it
- 66
- approval share
- 49%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 11 years
Median of the 5 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 64 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.9 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Natural tone that keeps the original style
“Google Translate is exceptionally good at maintaining naturalness when you put a multi-sentence/multi-paragraph block through it”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?” “Google Translate is actually good these days, and seems to mostly preserve the original tone”
Comment from 8 Oct 2026 in “You're saving one minute and now I can't know if I'm talking a human” “Google Translate won't fluff out the output with garbage or reformat everything with emoji.”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Jellyfin LLM/"AI" Development Policy” - Comment from 29 Dec 2025 in “Growing up in "404 Not Found": China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert”
Works well for everyday translation
“Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read.”
Comment from 19 Dec 2025 in “Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features” “I use G translate daily to handle living in a country where 95% of the population doesn’t speak any language I do.”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?” “for a majority of people old fashioned Google Translate works great”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Jellyfin LLM/"AI" Development Policy” - Comment from 25 Mar 2026 in “How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Devices at Airports”
Translates text in photos and camera
“Google translate will take a photo with foreign text in it, translate the text”
Comment from 17 Jul 2026 in “Blatant AI slop just won a 25k USD DeepMind Kaggle Grand Prize” “the best I've found is using Google Translate via camera/images”
Comment from 19 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)” Useful for live conversation
“we were able to talk for an hour or more about fountain pens and tomoe river paper alternatives using Google translate's dialogue feature”
Comment from 8 Nov 2025 in “Why Sam Altman Won't Be on the Hook for OpenAI's Spending Spree” “the latest Google Translate features based on the all voice real-time 3.5 Live model is as good as I have tried in Live Modes”
Comment from 11 Sep 2026 in “GPT‑Live‑1 in the API” “it generates sentences around a theme you specify and speaks them to you at varying speeds”
Comment from 11 Jul 2026 in “A Love Letter to Flashcards”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Output often crude or inaccurate
“all the automated options out there (wether it's Furiganator, the chrome extension, or Google Translate's pronunciation) are far from 100% accurate”
Comment from 18 Oct 2026 in “Furifont, a Japanese font that shows furigana” “With Google Translate you'd get a super sketchy translation out, very crude and not at all correct or idiomatic in the target language.”
Comment from 25 Jan 2026 in “Like digging 'your own grave': The translators grappling with losing work to AI” “After the lecture I reviewed the current production grade google translate...it butchered the translation”
Comment from 9 Mar 2026 in “Segagaga Has Been Translated into English” Invents content beyond the source text
“these days it "interprets" way too much, confabulating like an LLM and inserting stuff that's way beyond what's in the text”
Comment from 28 Sep 2026 in “When did Google get so weird?” “translation was (I think) mapping typical sentences from the source language to the corresponding typical situation in the target language”
Comment from 4 Apr 2026 in “YouTube's auto-dubbing rewrites meaning of sentences” Poor for language learning
“try looking up its meaning using a dictionary in the 2nd language you're practicing instead of using google translate”
Comment from 23 Nov 2025 in “Ask HN: Working in a language that isn't your native one. How hard was it?” “high chance you learn little to nothing by using it, and yet the user can hold up their phone to some Arabic or Chinese text”
Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “Will America Spend 9% of Its GDP on AI? The Industry Is Counting on It” Trails DeepL and other tools
“Google Translation never "became very good" and it still isn't when you compare it to DeepL or Kagi.”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo” “I honestly don't care what Google Translate does, because nobody who is serious about translation uses it”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power”
Other translation services people recommend
The three most recommended other translation services, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google TranslateThis page | 64 | 66 | 49% | 12 | 11 yrs5 owners | — |
| Kagi Translate | 50 | 26 | 66% | 6 | — | — |
| Firefox Translations | 26 | 4 | 87% | 9 | — | Approved |
| DeepL Translator | 25 | 13 | 66% | 11 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 151 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“all the automated options out there (wether it's Furiganator, the chrome extension, or Google Translate's pronunciation) are far from 100% accurate”
“Google Translate is actually good these days, and seems to mostly preserve the original tone”
“high chance you learn little to nothing by using it, and yet the user can hold up their phone to some Arabic or Chinese text”
“I used Google Translate for years to scrape hard targets like LinkedIn”
“you can use the old google translate model by clicking on "advanced" at the bottom”
“these days it "interprets" way too much, confabulating like an LLM and inserting stuff that's way beyond what's in the text”
“the latest Google Translate features based on the all voice real-time 3.5 Live model is as good as I have tried in Live Modes”
“I love/hate how Google translate assumes "Anh" means "brother" or "em" means "girl".”
“I still find Google Translate better for when I need to type emails in Russian”
“Google Translate is still a bit better, so I do regularly fall back to that.”
“Google translate will take a photo with foreign text in it, translate the text”
“it generates sentences around a theme you specify and speaks them to you at varying speeds”
“Google Translate's millions of lines of hand-rolled code has been entirely superseded by LLMs”
“a little bit of google translate, it was awesome and I learnt a lot!”
“translation was (I think) mapping typical sentences from the source language to the corresponding typical situation in the target language”
“google translate or google maps if you are traveling are very nice to have”
“using a literal translator (e.g: Google Translate, DeepL) will ensure we get to hear what you have to say”
“After the lecture I reviewed the current production grade google translate...it butchered the translation”
“Switching to a Google Translate tab every time or asking an AI to translate broke my flow completely.”
“i'm just so surprised they'd use chatgpt to do this, when it's quite as easily (and perhaps faster) to use google translate.”
“I was getting live German translated on my phone in 2015 with no problems.”
“Google Translate won't fluff out the output with garbage or reformat everything with emoji.”
“for a majority of people old fashioned Google Translate works great”
“With Google Translate you'd get a super sketchy translation out, very crude and not at all correct or idiomatic in the target language.”
“the best I've found is using Google Translate via camera/images”
“I was going to pull up google translate anyway; keeping it local to my device improves both convenience and privacy.”
“without the rest of the GSuite (Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Calendar, Translate) it was dead in the water”
“it preserves the nuances of your own speech instead of injecting the clear markers of LLMs”
“Google translate has offered machine translation for 20+ years that is more or less adequate to understand text written in a language I don't read.”
“Google Translate became very good compared to what came before it. Other stuff is better now”
“Google Translation never "became very good" and it still isn't when you compare it to DeepL or Kagi.”
“I use G translate daily to handle living in a country where 95% of the population doesn’t speak any language I do.”
“I have seen Google Translate hallucinate exactly zero times over thousands of queries”
“Google Translate is exceptionally good at maintaining naturalness when you put a multi-sentence/multi-paragraph block through it”
“Use, for example, Google Translate on the (Russian) explanations of the lyrics”
“Use Google Translate. It's the same architecture, trained to give a translation instead of a reply.”
“try looking up its meaning using a dictionary in the 2nd language you're practicing instead of using google translate”
“it was fluent in whatever language, Java or Mandarin and could piece them together well”
“I honestly don't care what Google Translate does, because nobody who is serious about translation uses it”
“we were able to talk for an hour or more about fountain pens and tomoe river paper alternatives using Google translate's dialogue feature”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.