The Internet giant is adding 110 new languages and dialects to its Google Translate service, bringing the total supported languages to 243. You can now translate Breton, Occita and even two Creoles!
Online for no less than eighteen years already, Google Translate has continued to improve and now relies on the technique of deep learning (“deep learning” in French), which allows it to imitate the functioning of the human brain thanks to a network of artificial neurons. In this way, the AI learns from its mistakes, corrected by Internet users, to improve itself. And suffice to say that the service has progressed in an extraordinary way over the years! Far from being content, like a simple dictionary, to translate into French a word entered from the keyboard of a smartphone, it now recognizes handwriting and can read long news texts published on the Web in a few seconds in the language of our choice and even acts as interpreter to facilitate verbal exchanges, all for free! It’s hardly surprising that Google Translate has become a real reflex for some!
But Google is not resting on its laurels! In a blog postthe company announced this Thursday, June 27, the integration of 110 languages to the 133 already available in Google Translate, including Breton, Occitan, two French Creoles – Seychellois and Mauritian –, Cantonese, Wolof, but also Panjabi – the most widely spoken language in Pakistan –, Manx – a Celtic language from the Isle of Man that is almost extinct –, Afar – a language spoken in Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia – and N’ko – a script created in 1949 to transcribe the Mandingo languages of West Africa. For this, nothing beats a good dose of artificial intelligence!
Google Translate: 660 million new speakers worldwide
it’s about the “most significant update since Google Translate launched” for the Internet giant, which spent four years setting up this project. “Some are major languages in the world, with more than 100 million speakers”rejoices Google. “Others are spoken by small indigenous communities, and a few have almost no native speakers but are making active revitalization efforts.”. In total, these new languages represent over 612 million speakers worldwide, opening the way for translations for about 8% of the world’s population! It’s worth noting that a quarter of these new languages come from Africa, which represents Google’s largest expansion of African languages—including Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda, Wolof, and more—to date.
This progress has been made possible thanks to the use of artificial intelligence, and more precisely of the large PaLM 2 language model, which is based on machine learning. One of its particularities is that it allows Google Translate to“learn closely related languages more effectively”, as for creoles for example. Specialized linguists, experts, translators and native speakers also contributed to this major update.
The update is currently rolling out. Subsequently, Google intends to honor the “1,000 Languages Initiative”, a commitment made in November 2022 aimed at building artificial intelligence models that will ultimately allow it to offer its services on the Internet in the 1,000 most spoken languages in the world. , out of the 7,000 total existing idioms.