Google has made public that it will incorporate 24 new languages to its translation tool Google Translate. The announcement was made during the annual I/O conference, held this week. In this annual event for developers Google usually presents many of the new features that the company will incorporate in the coming months, and among other announcements, it was also reported that Google Maps adds “reverse view” of large cities.
The new languages incorporated by the Google translator are spoken by more than 300 million people around the world
Among the new languages coming to Google Translate are some such as Sanskrit, Tsonga, Kurdish, Mizo and several languages spoken by American Indians such as Quechua, Guarani or Aymara. One of the languages included, Assamese, has more than 25 million speakers in northeastern India; and Maldivian, used in the Maldives, has about 300,000.
According to Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, this expansion of the translation tool will enable the company to serve more than 300 million speakers worldwide. With these new 24 languages, Google’s translation system is capable of translating a total of 133 languages.
Pichai himself assured at the conference that his company was developing an Artificial Intelligence system capable of recognize the language in which a text is written with a small sample, and then translate it. Google admits that this algorithm has yet to be perfected, but hopes that it will soon be available to all users.
The last time Google added a new language pack to its translator was in 2020. At that time, the company incorporated languages such as Turkmen, Uygur or Odia. However, despite the wide coverage already offered by the Google translator, there are still many languages that its algorithm does not understand. It is estimated that more than 7,000 languages are spoken in the world today. Google developers still have a lot of work ahead of them.
