Broadening Borders: Ambitious Language Growth in Google Translate
Google, the tech giant, is committed to breaking down language barriers as technology advances. As part of its 1,000 Languages Initiative, the company is prioritizing the most commonly used varieties of each language in its expansion.
The recent addition of 110 new languages to Google Translate is a significant step towards achieving this goal. These new languages span a diverse range of regions and populations, including Fon in Benin, Kikongo in Central Africa, Luo in East Africa, Wolof in Senegal, Siswati, Tshivenda, Afar, NKo, Tamazight, and many others.
In July 2023, Google made a notable move by adding South African Sign Language (SASL) to its service, further enhancing accessibility for South African users. Besides Siswati and Tshivenda, Google also added Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, Northern Sotho (Sepedi), Southern Sotho (Sesotho), Tswana, and English to make a total of nine supported languages in South Africa.
Google values language as a crucial aspect of communication and understanding. The company partners with expert linguists and native speakers to support more language varieties and spelling conventions over time. This ongoing effort aims to make communication more accessible and inclusive on a global scale.
The initiative uses PaLM 2, Google's next-generation language model, which boasts enhanced multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities. PaLM 2 has enabled more efficient translation and learning of closely related languages.
In May 2022, Google added 24 languages using Zero-Shot Machine Translation, including several African languages such as Bambara, Ewe, Krio, Lingala, Luganda, Oromo, Sepedi, Tigrinya, Tsonga, and Twi.
Siya Madikane, Google South Africa's communications manager, expresses excitement about the language expansion. "This is a significant milestone for us," Madikane said. "We are proud to be able to provide more South Africans with the tools they need to communicate effectively in their own languages."
The new languages represent over 614 million speakers worldwide, potentially opening up translation services to approximately 8% of the global population. The process of adding new languages to Google Translate includes decisions about which languages to include and how to handle specific spellings.
Google's ongoing effort to expand language support is part of a broader mission to bring us closer to a world where language barriers are a thing of the past. The goal is to make communication more accessible and inclusive, allowing people from all corners of the world to connect and understand each other better.
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