Google is expanding support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, the company announced yesterday. Up until now, Google Translate supported 133 languages, so this addition nearly doubles the options. Google’s PaLM 2 AI large language model helped Translate learn these new languages.
The AI model is especially proficient at picking up new languages that are closely related to others like Awadhi and Marwari which are close to Hindi and French creoles which is close to Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole.
A blog post released by Google senior software engineer Isaac Caswell shared that these new languages were spoken by more than 614 million people or around 8 percent of the global population.
He also noted that about a quarter of the languages were African calling it their “latest expansion of African languages to date.” It also includes Cantonese, saying it “ has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate but because Cantonese often overlapped with Mandarin in writing, it was hard to find data for it.”
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This new update brings the total number of languages supported by Google Translate to 243, while their goal is to eventually support 1,000 languages through the use of AI.
