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Does this have to do with German being such a structured language? Just a guess here, but it may explain things a bit.



basically, there's just a larger body of translated work to develop from for western european languages because the EU has to translate all official documents between the major languages

> One explanation could have to do with the text the algorithm uses to generate its translations. Google Translate works by drawing from vast banks of text, searching for patterns in language use to match future translation requests. Some of those texts include documents from the United Nations and the European Union that have to be translated into multiple languages.

(from first result i found for this bit of trivia but probably not the best: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/a-sec... )




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