By Akinsuroju Olubunmi
AI expands Google Translate
Google announced on Thursday that its Translate platform now includes 110 new languages, thanks to advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models.
This expansion is the largest in Google Translate’s history, made possible by the PaLM 2 large language model (LLM). “From Cantonese to Q’eqchi’, these new languages represent more than 614 million speakers, opening up translations for around 8% of the world’s population,” said Isaac Caswell, a senior software engineer for Google Translate. “Some are major world languages with over 100 million speakers, while others are spoken by small communities of Indigenous people or have active revitalization efforts.”
Among the notable additions is Cantonese, which has long been requested but was challenging to add due to its overlap with Mandarin. Shahmukhi, a variety of Punjabi spoken in Pakistan, and Afar, a tonal language spoken in Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, were also added.
Google Translate’s expansion includes Manx, the Celtic language of the Isle of Man, which nearly went extinct in 1974 but has seen a revival. Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea, was also added, and English speakers might find it intriguing to translate into due to its English-based creole nature.
Google is pursuing its 1,000 Languages Initiative, aiming to build AI models for the world’s 1,000 most-spoken languages. PaLM 2 has been crucial in helping Translate efficiently learn closely related languages, such as those near Hindi and French creoles.
“As technology advances, and as we continue to partner with expert linguists and native speakers, we’ll support even more language varieties and spelling conventions over time,” Caswell added.
AI Expands Google Translate