Question

I have been wondering for some time how does Google translate(or maybe a hypothetical translator) detect language from the string entered in the “from” field. I have been thinking about this and only thing I can think of is looking for words that are unique to a language in the input string. The other way could be to check sentence formation or other semantics in addition to keywords. But this seems to be a very difficult task considering different languages and their semantics. I did some research to find that there are ways that use n-gram sequences and use some statistical models to detect language. Would appreciate a high level answer too.

Answer 1

You don’t have to do deep analysis of text to have an idea of what language it’s in. Statistics tells us that every language has specific character patterns and frequencies. That’s a pretty good first-order approximation. It gets worse when the text is in multiple languages, but still it’s not something extremely complex.
Of course, if the text is too short (e.g. a single word, worse, a single short word), statistics doesn’t work, you need a dictionary.