Google has raised the bar even higher. The web giant announced Thursday that it has expanded the range of languages supported by its Google Translate service with the addition of 110 new ones. Using its large PaLM 2 language model, the platform, which competes with services like Deep or generative AI tools, goes from 133 to 243 available languages, in what it presents as “the largest expansion ever achieved”.
“From Cantonese to Q’eqchi’ (editor’s note: Mayan language spoken mainly in Guatemala and Belize), these new languages represent more than 614 million speakers, paving the way for translations for approximately 8% of the world’s population,” Google said in a blog post.
The company added, among others, Breton, Occitan, Lombard and Sicilian for Europe. It also explains that a quarter of the new languages added come from Africa, “which represents our largest expansion of African languages to date, including Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda and Wolof.”
After introducing a real-time translation systemfour years ago, and added 24 new languages in 2022 using its Zero-Shot machine translation system, Google is continuing with this new enrichment its goal of reaching 1,000 languages available in its Google Translate service. The latter is accessible via a web browser at translate.google.com or on mobile via the Android or iOS apps.
