Google Translate shut down in China due to ‘low usage’
The translator's website recorded 53.5 million visits per month
It is one of the few Google services available in mainland China. The translator site now redirects users to the Hong Kong version.
“We are shutting down Google Translate in mainland China due to low usage,” Google said in a statement.
But Google Translate’s Chinese website recorded 53.5 million visits from desktop and mobile devices in August, according to statistics from web analytics platform Similarweb.
Google has had a difficult relationship with China for years. A massive cyber attack, combined with heavy-handed government censorship that internet users have to deal with, prompted the US firm to pull its search engine out of China in 2010, just four years after officially entering the market. The move comes shortly after Google stopped censoring its services in the country in defiance of the government.
As a result, local rivals such as search engine Baidu and social networking and gaming giant Tencent have come to dominate the Chinese internet space as search and translation services.
China has forced the country’s tech giants to share details of their commercial algorithms with the Cyberspace Administration
Google Translate was re-introduced to mainland China in 2017 after rumors that it was set to make a comeback. But now it rejoins Gmail, Chrome and Search in the list of unavailable Google products in the country, much to the frustration of users but no doubt to the delight of VPN service owners.
Despite the apparent hostility, reports surfaced in 2018 that Google had created a heavily censored version of its search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, for the Chinese market that linked queries to phone numbers. The new version of the search was also said to block some prohibited topics, including religion, human rights and peaceful protests. The news sparked outrage from many Googlers, US politicians and human rights activists, leading to the project being shut down a few months later, with the guarantee that it would never appear again.
Recently, tensions between China and the US have been growing. The passage of the Chip Law has sparked a flurry of claims of discrimination by Chinese politicians, while US officials ordering Nvidia and AMD to stop selling their high-performance AI-focused GPUs to the country have sparked outrage. The US is also hitting China with export bans, hampering plans to develop the domestic semiconductor market.
Google currently has a very limited presence in China. Some hardware, including smartphones, is made domestically, but The New York Times reported last month that the company has moved some production of its Pixel smartphones to Vietnam. However, Google still works with Chinese developers who create apps for the Android operating system around the world, which will then be available in the Google Play Store, even though it is also blocked in China.
