Google Translate gets support for 24 additional languages
At its I/O developer conference today, Google kicked things off by announcing an expansion relating to Google Translate. Namely, that the service now supports 24 additional languages. This brings the total supported languages to a whopping 133.
The new additions are the first where something called Zero-Shot Machine Translation was used – where a machine learning model only sees monolingual text. It learns to translate in another language without ever seeing a translation example. Although technically this is impressive, it also means that the accuracy of translations in other languages is not as high, at least for now. Google promises to improve the quality of its results.
The newly added languages are spoken by a total of over 300 million people across the globe, including 800,000 in the far northeast of India, and 45 million people in Central Africa. Some indigenous languages from the Americas and an English dialect were added for the first time.
The full list is: Assamese, Aymara, Bambara, Bhojpuri, Dhivehi, Dogri, Ewe, Guarani, Ilocano, Konkani, Krio, Kurdish (Sorani), Lingala, Luganda, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), Mizo, Oromo, Quechua, Sanskrit, Sepedi, Tigrinya, Tsonga, and Twi.