Context Reader

Reading in another language

How accurate is Google Translate?

Accurate enough to tell you what a page is about. Least accurate exactly where you need it most: one word, a specialist term, or a language that has less text online. In one study of hospital discharge instructions, the meaning survived in 94% of Spanish translations and 55% of Armenian ones — and what went wrong in the rest was not clumsy wording, it was the opposite instruction.

Written on 26 September 2026. Every number here comes from the two studies linked at the end. I build Context Reader, a free extension for reading in another language, so read this knowing that.

What one study actually measured

Researchers took twenty real emergency-department discharge instructions, ran them through Google Translate into seven languages, and asked bilingual speakers one question about each: did the instruction still mean what it meant in English? Not "is it elegant" — does a patient reading this do the right thing.

Google Translate accuracy by language, from Taira et al. 2021 Share of emergency-department instructions whose meaning survived translation: Spanish 94.0 per cent, Tagalog 90.0 per cent, Korean 82.5 per cent, Chinese 81.7 per cent, Vietnamese 77.5 per cent, Farsi 67.5 per cent, Armenian 55.0 per cent. Spanish 94% Tagalog 90% Korean 82.5% Chinese 81.7% Vietnamese 77.5% Farsi 67.5% Armenian 55% Meaning kept, by language

Share of instructions whose meaning survived. Taira BR, Kreger V, Orue A, Diamond LC, A Pragmatic Assessment of Google Translate for Emergency Department Instructions, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2021 — 400 judgements by 20 bilingual reviewers.

Two things stand out. Spanish is genuinely good. And the spread is enormous: the same tool, the same sentences, and Armenian readers got something usable barely half the time.

Why accuracy changes with the language

These systems learn from text. The more of a language exists online, translated alongside other languages, the better the system gets at it. Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Chinese have oceans of it. Armenian, Farsi and most of the world's languages have far less, and the model has correspondingly less to go on.

It is not a judgement about the languages. It is a fact about how much of each one was written down where a machine could read it. Google has said its newer language support leans on large language models to bridge into languages closely related to ones it already knows, which helps — but it does not invent the missing text.

The errors that survive are the dangerous ones

You would expect the failures to look broken. Mostly they don't. In the same study, one Armenian translation offered a patient an anti-tank missile where the English said ibuprofen — obvious, and harmless because nobody would follow it. The quiet ones are worse. In an earlier study of the same kind of instructions, "hold the kidney medicine until you speak to your kidney doctor" came back in Chinese as "keep taking kidney medicine until you talk to your kidney doctor": fluent, confident, and the opposite of what the doctor meant.

That is the shape of machine-translation error. Not gibberish you can spot — a smooth sentence with one thing reversed.

Is Google Translate a dictionary?

No, and this is where most disappointment comes from. A dictionary lists every meaning a word has and leaves the choosing to you. A translator has to choose, and when you give it a single word there is nothing to choose from, so it returns the most common meaning. In a lab report, culture is a sample grown to find bacteria. Alone in a box, it is art and customs. The tool is not wrong about the word; it never saw your sentence.

How to check a translation when you don't know the language

1 · Start

hold the medicine

The sentence you actually need to understand.

2 · Translate

→ your language

Whole sentence, never the single word.

3 · Translate back

keep taking it?

If you don't get your own words back, the meaning moved.

Back-translation is rough — a good translation can come back worded differently — but a reversed instruction almost always shows up. Two more habits that cost nothing: paste the whole paragraph rather than the sentence, and say out loud what the text is about before you trust the result, because most bad translations are a word pulled out of its field.

When not to rely on it at all

Anything you will act on: a dose, a deadline, a clause, a consent form. The study above was written precisely because hospitals were using machine translation with patients, and its authors' conclusion was not "don't" but "not on its own" — give the English alongside it, and use a human interpreter for anything that matters. The same logic covers contracts and immigration forms.

Where this leaves you, and where my extension fits

Translation is the right tool for a page you cannot read at all. For a page you can mostly follow, where one word stopped you, it is the wrong shape: you don't want the page moved into your language, you want that word explained in the sentence it is sitting in.

That is what Context Reader does — the free extension I build. Select the word and it sends the paragraph with it, then answers with the one meaning that fits, in your language. It is the difference between "what does this word mean" and "what does it mean here".

Context Reader open on a research article: the word significant is selected, and the bubble explains that in science it means the difference was unlikely to be chance.
The same word, answered for the sentence it is in rather than in general. Captured from the extension, not a mockup.

It has the same limits, honestly: the answers come from a model, only English and Sinhala ship examples checked by a speaker, and the EN button exists so you can see the same answer in English and catch a bad one. For a dose or a clause, ask a person.

Questions

Is Google Translate accurate?

For whole sentences between widely written languages, usually yes. In one study of emergency-department instructions it kept the meaning in 94% of Spanish translations and 55% of Armenian ones, and the errors that remained were the serious kind. Treat it as good for the gist and unreliable for a single word or a specialist term.

Is Google Translate accurate for my language?

It depends on how much text that language has online, because that is what these systems learn from. Spanish, French, German and Chinese do well. Smaller languages are noticeably weaker, and the same study found Armenian kept the meaning only about half the time.

Is Google Translate a dictionary?

No, and this is the most common mix-up. A dictionary lists every meaning a word has and lets you choose. A translator must choose for you, and with a single word it has no context to choose from, so it gives you the most common meaning.

Can I use Google Translate for medical or legal text?

For understanding roughly what a document is about, yes. For anything you will act on — a dose, a deadline, a clause — no. Two studies of medical instructions found rare but serious reversals, including a translation that told a patient to keep taking a medicine they had been told to stop.

How do I check a translation when I do not know the language?

Translate the result back into the language you started in. If the word that returns is not the word you began with, the meaning moved. It is rough, but it catches the obvious failures.

Sources

Related: why a single word comes back wrong, and how to understand English words when it isn't your first language.

Add to Chrome See it working

Free. Chrome, Brave and Edge install from the Chrome Web Store; Firefox from addons.mozilla.org.