Google Translate Is Making Global Interaction Easier Than Ever With 110 Languages Added
Google Translate does its part in helping us interact with the massive world that exists around us, whether it is to understand content originating from other countries, to converse better with new friends that we’ve made, or to make traveling the world a lot less of an embarrassing task (avoid telling a Japanese inn owner that you hate the establishment when you meant to say it is beautiful).
Now, things are going to get even better, as Google Translate has just had its largest expansion ever. Google has announced that support for 110 new languages is being rolled out to the app, and the number alone shows how massive that is — quite a long way from 10 years ago when the tech giant was announcing 10 new languages.
According to Google, this brings support to 614 million additional native speakers in the world (about 8% of the world’s population), with some of the new languages being major world languages. A quarter of these are African languages, marking the biggest expansion of languages from that continent.
Arguably, the biggest language being added is Cantonese, which is a language similar to Mandarin. However, other major languages such as Wolof, Fon, the Shahmukhi script of Punjabi, Afar, and Tamazight, are among notable additions to the platform.
The PaLM 2 Large Language Model (AKA AI) Made This Degree Of Expansion Possible
You must be wondering about the amount of work that has to go into rolling out 110 new languages at the same time, or possibly, the actual process behind adding support for all of these languages. Well, the answer to how Google was able to do it might not really surprise you. The answer, in these modern times, is rather unsurprisingly AI. To be specific, the PaLM 2 large language model.
Many of the languages that were added were made possible due to the fact that they are rather similar to languages that Google Translate already supports, or languages that Google Translate was trying to learn at the same time. The LLM was then able to more easily appreciate these new languages because it has already learned some aspects of existing ones.
Google hopes to take this a lot farther in the future. According to them, the aim is to continue to build on their AI models until it gets to a point where they can support the top 1,000 most-spoken languages in the world. That’s a lofty goal, but after today’s major boost to Google Translate’s capabilities, it might not be an unrealistic target to hit.
