Two dozen new languages including eight Indian languages have been added to Google Translate, a favourite translation tool of many users. Following this update, Google Translate now supports 133 languages used around the globe.
Besides Sanskrit, the other Indian languages in the latest version of Google Translate are Assamese, Bhojpuri, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Mizo and Meiteilon (Manipuri). With these significant additions, the total number of Indian languages supported by the service has gone up to 19.
The announcement was made at the annual Google conference I/O that began late on Wednesday night.
Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It was launched on April 8, 2006 and is used by more than 500 million people every day.
Isaac Caswell, senior Software Engineer, Google Translate, wrote on social media that over 300 million people speak these newly added languages — like Mizo, used by around 800,000 people in the far northeast of India, and Lingala, used by over 45 million people across Central Africa. As part of this update, Indigenous languages of the Americas (Quechua, Guarani and Aymara) and an English dialect (Sierra Leonean Krio) have also been added to Translate for the first time.
Caswell was quoted in a news report as saying “Sanskrit is the number one, most requested language at Google Translate, and we are finally adding it.’’
He wrote, “For years, Google Translate has helped break down language barriers and connect communities all over the world. And we want to make this possible for even more people — especially those whose languages aren’t represented in most technology. So today we’ve added 24 languages to Translate, now supporting a total of 133 used around the globe.’’
Here is the list of 24 new languages added to Google Translate
–Assamese (used by about 25 million people in Northeast India)
–Aymara (used by about two million people in Bolivia, Chile and Peru)
–Bambara (used by about 14 million people in Mali)
–Bhojpuri (used by about 50 million people in northern India, Nepal and Fiji)
–Dhivehi (used by about 300,000 people in the Maldives)
–Dogri (used by about three million people in northern India)
–Ewe (used by about seven million people in Ghana and Togo)
–Guarani (used by about seven million people in Paraguay and Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil)
–Ilocano (used by about 10 million people in northern Philippines)
–Konkani (used by about two million people in Central India)
–Krio (used by about four million people in Sierra Leone)
–Kurdish (Sorani) (used by about eight million people, mostly in Iraq)
–Lingala, used by about 45 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Angola and the Republic of South Sudan
–Luganda (used by about 20 million people in Uganda and Rwanda)
–Maithili (used by about 34 million people in northern India)
–Meiteilon (Manipuri) (used by about two million people in Northeast India)
–Mizo (used by about 830,000 people in Northeast India)
–Oromo (used by about 37 million people in Ethiopia and Kenya)
–Quechua (used by about 10 million people in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and surrounding countries)
–Sanskrit (used by about 20,000 people in India)
–Sepedi (used by about 14 million people in South Africa)
–Tigrinya (used by about eight million people in Eritrea and Ethiopia)
–Tsonga (used by about seven million people in Eswatini, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe)
–Twi (used by about 11 million people in Ghana)
Google said that these 24 languages have been added using Zero-Shot Machine Translation, where a machine learning model only sees monolingual text. The Zero-Shot Machine Translation basically learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example. “While this technology is impressive, it isn’t perfect,” Google said in an official blog post.
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