Google Translate expands horizons: 110 new languages added

Google has announced the addition of 110 new languages to the Google Translate service. This is the largest expansion in the history of the service, increasing the total number of supported languages to 243.

Here's What We Know

Google's innovative PaLM 2 artificial intelligence language model has been key to mastering new languages, especially those that are closely related, such as Awadhi and Marwadi, as well as French Creole languages.

Standing out among the new languages is the Cantonese dialect, long awaited by Google Translate users. Problems with the overlap between the written forms of Cantonese and Mandarin made it difficult to train models, but this obstacle has now been overcome. An interesting fact: about a quarter of the new languages come from Africa, emphasising the global reach of the update. Most of the added languages are used by at least a million speakers, and some have hundreds of millions of speakers.

Google aims to support even more language varieties and spelling conventions over time. The broader goal is to build artificial intelligence models that will support the 1,000 most common languages around the world.

Source: Google