Google is adding support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, the company announced Thursday. Until now, Google Translate supported 133 languages, so this expansion – which the company says is the biggest ever – marks a significant leap forward.
Google’s PaLM 2 AI language model helped Translate learn these new languages. It was especially good for learning those that were related to each other, such as languages “close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi, and French creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole,” said Google’s Isaac Caswell. says in a blog post.
The list of newly supported languages in Translate includes Cantonese, which “has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate,” says Caswell. “Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, finding data and training models is complicated.” Caswell also states that “about a quarter of new languages come from Africa”.
Most new languages are spoken by at least a million people, says Caswell On the edge in an interview, while “several” are spoken by hundreds of millions of people.