Google has announced an exciting new update to one of its most popular tools, Google Translate. The tech giant has added support of 110 new languages to its translation feature, increasing the total number of languages supported to 243. This is an explosive expansion compared to 2022, when it added 24 new languages.
The expansion is thanks to the company’s own Pathways Language Model (PaLM) 2 large language model. According to the firm, the new languages in Google Translate represent more than 614 million speaker, increasing translations for about 8% of the global population. This includes major languages with over 100 million speakers as well as smaller ones spoken by indigenous communities; a quarter of the new languages are actually made up of African languages, including Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda and Wolof.
Some of the newly-added languages that Malaysians might care about include Iban, Jawi, and even Cantonese. For the latter, Google said that it was tricky to find data and train models for Cantonese as it often overlaps with Mandarin in writing. Google Translate now also has support for Punjabi (Shahmukhi), which is the most spoken language in Pakistan.
This expansion is actually a part of the company’s 1,000 Languages Initiative, which aims to build AI models that support 1,000 of the most spoken languages (out of over 7,000). With that, Google says we can expect more languages to be added over time.
(Source: Google)
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