Google on June 27 announced that it is adding support for 110 languages including Indian languages such as Tulu, Marwadi, Awadhi, Khasi, Santali, and Kokborok to Google Translate, marking the largest-ever language expansion of its translation product.
The company said these new languages represent more than 614 million speakers, or about 8 percent of the world's population. Some of these languages have over 100 million speakers while others are spoken by small communities of Indigenous people.
It also includes a few languages that have almost no native speakers but are witnessing active revitalisation efforts.
About a quarter of the new languages come from Africa including Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda and Wolof, the company said.
With this expansion, Google Translate now supports around 243 languages across the world, a jump from around 133 languages earlier. These languages will be available on Google Translate's website and its mobile apps on Android and iOS.
Read: How Google Translate used AI to decipher the world's oldest language in minutes
This language expansion is powered by the tech giant's PaLM 2 large language model that helped Google Translate more efficiently learn languages that are closely related to each other, such as languages close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi, Google's Issac Caswell said in a blogpost.
Caswell said that the company considers various factors including regional varieties, dialects, and different spelling standards while adding support for new languages on its translation product.
"Our approach has been to prioritise the most commonly used varieties of each language. For example, Romani is a language that has many dialects all throughout Europe. Our models produce text that is closest to Southern Vlax Romani, a commonly used variety online. But it also mixes in elements from others, like Northern Vlax and Balkan Romani" he said.
Google plans to add support for more language varieties and spelling conventions over time as technology advances and the company continues to partner with expert linguists and native speakers, Caswell said.
Read: India well-positioned to help shape future of AI: Google DeepMind's Jeff Dean
In 2022, Google had announced its ambitions to build artificial intelligence models that will support the 1,000 most spoken languages across the world.
In the same year, Google Translate had added support for 24 new languages, including eight Indian languages, using Zero-Shot Machine Translation approach, where a machine learning model learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example.
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