I'm sure you're on the right track, regarding the % of the training corpus in English vs. other languages. It has done very well with colloquial Spanish as spo

I'm sure you're on the right track, regarding the % of the training corpus in English vs. other languages. It has done very well with colloquial Spanish as spoken in California, for example, which probably isn't too surprising. What amazes me (and that you hint at) is that it still manages to pick more appropriate word/phrase choices, most of the time, even compared to dedicated translation software. I get the feeling (and I fully admit, this is just a feeling) that it's not using English, or any other language, as a pivot, but that there's some higher-dimensionality translation going on that allows it to perform as well as it does.