Google Translate is far from perfect, but it's still a useful way to get information and join a conversation. Now, the options are expanding, as Google is using AI to add 110 new languages to its translations, including Cantonese, Punjabi (Shamukhi), and NKo. About a quarter of these languages are African, and Google claims that all the new languages together represent 614 million speakers, or about 8% of the world's population.
Google calls its LLM, PaLM 2, “an important piece of the puzzle, helping translators learn more effectively languages that are closely related to each other, such as languages close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi, and French Creoles, like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole.” Isaac Caswell, senior software engineer at Google Translate, adds that “as our technology improves and we continue to work with expert linguists and native speakers, we will be able to support even more language varieties and spelling conventions over time.”
Google Translate last experienced a massive influx of languages in May 2022 with the help of Zero-Shot machine translation. Zero-Shot allows models to learn new languages without seeing any examples. Later that year, Google announced its 1,000 Languages initiative, which aims to create AI models that can support, you guessed it, the 1,000 most commonly spoken languages around the world.
