Google Translate gets 110 new languages with AI's help, bringing the total to 243
Google Translate is getting support for 110 new languages. In a blog post published on Thursday, Google revealed that this latest effort is its largest language expansion ever, almost doubling the 133 languages that the tool supported prior and now reaching 243 languages in total.
The new languages are spoken by more than 614 million people across the globe, representing around 8% of the world's population, according to Google. Some of them are world languages with more than 100 million speakers, others are spoken by small groups of Indigenous people, and still others have no native speakers but are actively being revitalized.
Around 25% of the new languages come from Africa. In Google's biggest expansion of African languages, the new additions will cover Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda, and Wolof.
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Google also highlighted other new languages that its translation tool now handles.
Cantonese has been one of the most requested languages, Google said, but it's a tricky one because the written characters overlap with those of Mandarin. Manx is a Celtic language spoken in the Isle of Man that almost died out in 1974, but has since been revived, with thousands of people now fluent in it. Punjabi (Shahmukhi) is the variety of Punjabi written in Perso-Arabic script (Shahmukhi) and is the most spoken language by people in Pakistan.
Because of regional varieties, dialects, and different spelling standards, translating a single language can be challenging. Many languages have no one accepted variant, making it difficult to pick the "correct" one. As one example cited by Google, Romani is a language with many dialects throughout Europe.
To handle demanding translations, Google turned to AI, specifically its AI-powered PaLM 2 LLM (large language model). The company cited PaLM 2 as a key factor in helping Google Translate better understand languages closely connected to each other, such as French creole languages like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole.
With around 7,000 languages spoken on the planet, Google Translate is still limited to a small fraction of them. However, the company is slowly making progress.
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In 2022, Google added 24 new languages via a machine learning model that learns another language even without seeing an example of it. In the same year, the company announced the 1,000 Languages Initiative, with the goal of building AI models that can translate among the 1,000 most spoken languages in the world.
Google Translate is available on the web, in the Chrome browser, and as a mobile app for iOS and Android.