Google announced on Thursday that it is adding support for 110 new languages to its Google Translate app using artificial intelligence. The service will be available on smartphones and the Web and will help people worldwide.
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Before the current development, Google Translate supported 133 different languages, but with the new addition, the company has expanded its service to 243 languages in total. A quarter of the new languages included are of African descent. The most prominent new languages include Afar, Cantonese, Punjabi, and Tok Pisin.
This is the largest influx of languages after the previous big addition of May 2022, for which the company used zero-shot machine learning technology. Google is using its PaLM2 for learning/translation, which is based on Zero-shot technology. With this technique, a model does not have to learn from examples, which allows for faster learning.
Later, in 2022, Google announced its 1000 languages initiative for the most common global languages. Google said its large language model (LLM) PaLM2 helps translate closely related languages more efficiently. Senior software engineer at Google Translate, Isaac Caswell said,
“[PaLM2] a key piece to the puzzle, helping Translate more efficiently learn languages that are closely related to each other, including languages close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi.”
He added that Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole are close to French Creoles, which are also translated through PaLM2. The same AI model was used to power the Bard chatbot, which evolved into Gemini but now uses a different model. PaLM2 was trained on huge datasets containing 250 billion parameters.
Google Translate will roll out more languages
PaLM2 is an advanced AI model that performs fluently on written texts, making it capable of handling linguistic tasks. However, the model lacks the ability to process audio or visuals. Google said it chose the “most common varieties of each language,” as it was difficult to choose which languages to add.
The company said that the expansion will cater to 8% of the world’s population as the selected languages are spoken by “more than 614 million speakers.” Caswell said that some of the languages have more than 100 million speakers.
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The company considered smaller communities, adding languages spoken by indigenous communities with few people. Among them are some languages with no native speakers but “active revitalization efforts.”
A Reddit user who goes by the name of stanley_fatmax commented on the update saying,
“Impressive; this is one of the really clever and useful uses of AI, in my opinion. I’m glad they’re giving Google Translate some love.”
However, Reddit user also said that most of the foreigners he knows now use an alternative service called DeepL. The user said that Google Translate is falling behind and the company should work on the already supported languages along with adding new ones.
The company revealed that the most requested language was Cantonese, which often overlaps with Chinese. Obtaining data for training in the Cantonese language was difficult because of its resemblance to Mandarin writing. Another example is the Manx language from the Isle of Man, which went extinct in 1974 with the death of its last native speaker. The language has since been revived, and now thousands of people speak it across the island. Google said it will keep rolling out new languages over the next few days.
Cryptopolitan reporting by Aamir Sheikh
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