Google Translate marked its sixth birthday on Thursday with news that more than 200 million people use the free online translation service monthly.

Google Translate engineer, Franz Och said, "In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you'd find in one million books".

He further stated, "We imagine a future where anyone in the world can consume and share any information, no matter what language it's in, and no matter where it pops up".

Google Translate, which lets people paste or type text in an on-screen box to have it quickly converted into any language of their choice, rolled out in 2006 with English, Chinese and Arabic.

"We can now translate among any of 64 different languages, including many with a small Web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish... and even Esperanto".  Och said of the service at translate.google.com.

According to Google, Traffic to Translate from smart-phones has been growing exponentially, and more than 92 percent of the users are from outside the United States,

Franz Och said, "What all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day".

"By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate".