Launched in April 2006 as a statistical machine translation service, it used United Nations and European Parliament documents and transcripts to gather linguistic data. Rather than translating languages directly, it first translates text to English and then pivots to the target language in most of the language combinations it posits in its grid,[5] with a few exceptions including Catalan-Spanish.[6] During a translation, it looks for patterns in millions of documents to help decide on which words to choose and how to arrange them in the target language.