Immediately after the launch of the translator in beta mode in the spring of 2010, it was only available in three languages — English, Russian and Ukrainian, with a limit of 10,000 characters. Yandex.Translate has some languages that are missing from Google Translate, such as Russian national minority languages of Hill Mari. As of , translation is available in 98 languages:
Afrikaans
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Bashkir
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Burmese
Catalan
Cebuano
Chinese
Chuvash
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Elvish
Emoji
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Finnish
French
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hebrew
Hill Mari
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kabardian
Kannada
Kazakh
Khmer
Korean
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Nepali
Norwegian
Papiamento
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tagalog
Tajik
Tamazight
Tamil
Tatar
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Udmurt
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Xhosa
Yakut
Yiddish
The translation direction is determined automatically. It is possible to translate words, sentences, or web pages if needed. There is also the option to view both the translation and the original at the same time in a two-window view. In addition to machine translation, there is also an accessible and complete English-Russian and Russian-English dictionary. There is an app for devices based on the iOS software, Windows Phone and Android. You can listen to the pronunciation of the translation and the original text using a text to speech converter built in. Translations of sentences and words can be stored to a "Favorites" section located below the input field.
Limitations
Yandex.Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. When the online service was first introduced, the head of Yandex.Translate, Alexei Baitin, stated that although machine translation cannot be compared to a literary text, the translations produced by the system can provide a convenient option for understanding the general meaning of the text in a foreign language.
Translation methodology
According to Arkady Volozh, the mechanism of Translate is as follows: In addition to the free version for users, there is a commercial APIonline translator, designed primarily for the localization of sites of Internet shops and travel companies.