Google Translate is adding 110 new languages, the platform’s biggest expansion to date, the company, which represents nearly a tenth of the world’s population, said Thursday. And all thanks to the advances of AI.
The search giant’s PaLM 2 language model has been “helping Translate more efficiently learn languages that are closely related to each other,” Google software engineer Isaac Caswell said in a statement. That includes “languages close to Hindi, such as Awadhi and Marwadi, and French creoles such as Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole.”
Other new languages include Afar, Cantonese and Tamazight (Amazigh). Google says the new languages represent more than 614 million people, or about 8% of the world’s population. About a quarter of them are from Africa, making it the largest expansion of African languages in Google Translate yet.
If a language has regional varieties and dialects, Google language models create a hybrid version by combining different elements. The company says it prioritizes “the most used varieties of each language.”
“For example,” the company notes, “Roma is a language that has many dialects throughout Europe. Our models produce text closest to Southern Vlax Romani, a variety commonly used online. But it also mixes elements from others, such as Northern Vlax and Balkan Romani.”
In 2022, Google added 24 new languages Translate using what is called Zero-Shot machine translation, in which a machine learning model can translate into another language without seeing an example. It also introduced the 1,000 Languages Initiative, whose goal is to build AI models to support the 1,000 most spoken languages.
“As technology advances and we continue to partner with expert linguists and native speakers, over time we will support even more language varieties and spelling conventions,” Caswell said in the statement.
You can access Google Translate at translate.google.com through the Android and iOS mobile apps.
Google is one of many tech companies leveraging AI to power its offerings. It has incorporated the technology into platforms like Gmail, Search and Messages, and made AI the main focus of its I/IO event in May. Competitors like Apple and Microsoft have also integrated AI into their products and services, and Apple earlier this month unveiled a set of “Apple Intelligence” updates coming to the iPhone.
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