Google has added 24 more languages to its Google Translate language-translation tool. Translate currently covers a total of 133 languages used around the world.
The new languages range from Bhojpuri, which is spoken by as many as 50 million people in northern India, Nepal, and Fiji, to Dhivehi with its estimated 300,000 speakers in the Maldives.
According to the company, more than 300 million people speak these languages as their first or second language. It further added that these languages are also the first ones added by Google utilizing a translation known as Zero-Shot Machine translation, a learning model that translates any text into another language by just viewing the texts.
This can be useful for languages where large datasets of human translations, which can be used to train a computer, are not available.
In a blog post, the business stated that while the technology isn't perfect now, they will continue to work on models to give a similar experience with existing languages.
"For many supported languages, even the largest languages in Africa that we have supported - say like Yoruba, Igbo, the translation is not great. It will definitely get the idea across but often it will lose much of the subtlety of the language," Google Translate research scientist Isaac Caswell said.
In 2020, Google Translate added five new languages to the platform in what was then its first expansion in the past few years.
The new languages range from Bhojpuri, which is spoken by as many as 50 million people in northern India, Nepal, and Fiji, to Dhivehi with its estimated 300,000 speakers in the Maldives.
According to the company, more than 300 million people speak these languages as their first or second language. It further added that these languages are also the first ones added by Google utilizing a translation known as Zero-Shot Machine translation, a learning model that translates any text into another language by just viewing the texts.
This can be useful for languages where large datasets of human translations, which can be used to train a computer, are not available.
In a blog post, the business stated that while the technology isn't perfect now, they will continue to work on models to give a similar experience with existing languages.
"For many supported languages, even the largest languages in Africa that we have supported - say like Yoruba, Igbo, the translation is not great. It will definitely get the idea across but often it will lose much of the subtlety of the language," Google Translate research scientist Isaac Caswell said.
In 2020, Google Translate added five new languages to the platform in what was then its first expansion in the past few years.
