Does anyone know if google translator always translates through a central language.?

I was wondering if google translator always translates through a central language. For example, if you are translating from spanish to portuguese, does it translate from spanish to english and then english to portuguese, or does it have databases connecting all the languages?Does anyone know if google translator always translates through a central language.?
Yes, it always answers through a central language. I once tried translating German to Russian. You know how the translator leaves words it doesn't know in the original language? This time, it left English words in the text. Obviously, it knew the German-to-English translation, but not the English-to-Russian one for these words.

I cannot tell you if the central language is always English, but I guess so.

By the way, if it were trying to implement direct translations for every language pair supported, it wouldn't be a matter of a database only. It would be a question of "how the grammatical rules from language A get transformed into the rules from language B". And this is much harder to implement than a simple dictionary database.Does anyone know if google translator always translates through a central language.?
try yahoo's translator, fast and easy. and sometimes fails.