When we need to translate a text from a language we don’t know, the first option that comes to mind is to use Google Translate, one of the oldest translators and the one that offers the best results.
However, in recent years, the DeepL translator has become a better option since it analyzes the entire document before translating it without limiting itself to translating phrases independently as Google’s service sometimes seems to do.
DeepL relies on Artificial Intelligence to do its job, something that Google Translate has also been doing since 2016 when it changed the traditional translation method to one based on neural networks.
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, Google has just announced that its translation service has expanded its support to include 110 new languages, the largest expansion to date.
More than 100 new languages
In case you’re wondering, it’s estimated that there are currently between 3,000 and 7,000 living languages in the world, although most of them have very few users, so Google’s work in this regard is commendable, as it’s the best way to prevent them from being lost. In this regard, Google set out a couple of years ago to offer translation support for the 1,000 most widely spoken languages, so it still has a long way to go.
The 110 languages that have just been added to the extensive list of languages that Google Translate is capable of translating represent more than 600 million people. Google’s intention is to continue expanding the number of languages it supports, something possible thanks to Artificial Intelligence and collaboration agreements with linguistic experts and native speakers.
While it is true that having a machine translation service is always better than nothing, the quality of translations still has a long way to go, especially in related languages that have a large number of variants, dialects, and spelling standards such as those just included, and which, for the most part, come from Africa.
In the press release where it announced this, Google states that this has been possible thanks to LLM PaLM 2, the same language model that is used in the AI that the search giant has just launched in Gmail to summarize and reply to emails using AI and in Google Workspace to rewrite and summarize documents, functions that, for the moment, are only available to companies.
After this announcement, the number of languages that Google Translate is capable of translating is 243, so it still has a long way to go to reach the 1,000 that it intends to offer. If you want to know which are the 110 languages that Google has added to its translation service, you can do so through this link. These new languages are now available from the application available for mobile devices as well as directly from their website available from here.
