Google Translate is adding support for 24 new languages including eight new Indian languages, the internet giant announced at its annual developer conference Google I/O 2022 on May 11. This brings the total languages supported by the translation service to 133 languages.
Among the new Indian languages being introduced include Assamese, Bhojpuri, Sanskrit, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), and Mizo.
Google said it is also adding indigenous languages of the Americas such as Quechua (Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador), Guarani (Paraguay and Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil) and Aymara (Bolivia, Chile and Peru) and an English-based dialect Krio (Sierra Leone) for the first time on the service as part of this update.
The list of languages also includes Lingala (Democratic Republic of Congo), Luganda (Uganda and Rwanda), Bambara (Mali), Dhivehi (Maldives), Ewe (Ghana and Togo), Guarani (Paraguay and Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil), Ilocano (northern Philippines), Kurdish (Iraq), Oromo (Ethiopia and Kenya), Sepedi (South Africa), Tigrinya (Eritrea and Ethiopia), Tsonga (Eswatini, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe) and Twi (Ghana). Overall, 300 million people use these 24 languages as their first or second language, the company said.
Google said these are also the first set of languages it has added using a translation technique called Zero-Shot Machine Translation, where the machine learning model learns to translate into another language by only seeing texts in a single language without ever seeing an example translation.
"There is a long tail of languages that are underrepresented on the web today and translating them is a hard technical problem since translation models are usually trained with bilingual text. However, there is not enough publicly available bilingual text for every language" Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said in his keynote speech on May 11.
"With advances in machine learning, we have developed a monolingual approach where the model learns to translate a new language without ever seeing a direct translation of it" Pichai said.
The internet giant noted that it chose to specifically work with languages that had very large speaker populations and those where technology is typically underserved, since the technology is new, nwhich led to them work on several languages in Africa and India due to the presence of large ethnic and linguistic groups.
Since it's a new technology, the internet giant said it chose to specifically work with languages that had very large speaker populations and those where technology is typically underserved, which led to their work on several languages in Africa and India due to the presence of large ethnic and linguistic groups.
"While this technology is impressive, it isn't perfect and we'll keep improving these models to deliver the same experience," the company said in a blogpost.
These new languages will start rolling out to Google Translate users on May 11 and it will be available to all users by the end of the week.
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