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Google Translate is adding 110 new languages, the platform’s biggest expansion yet, the company said Thursday, representing nearly a tenth of the world’s population. And it’s all thanks to the advancement of AI.
The search giant PALM 2 the language model “helps Translate more effectively learn languages that are closely related to each other,” Google software engineer Isaac Caswell said in a release. This includes “languages close to Hindi such as Awadhi and Marwadi, and French Creoles such as Seychellois Creole and Moorish Creole”.
Other new languages include Afar, Cantonese and Tamazigh (Amazigh). Google says new languages account for more than 614 million people, or about 8% of the world’s population. About a quarter of these are from Africa, making this the largest expansion of African languages on Google Translate to date.
If a language has regional varieties and dialects, Google’s language models create a hybrid version by combining different elements. The company says it prioritizes “the most commonly used varieties of each language.
“For example,” the company notes, “Romani is a language that has many dialects across Europe. Our models produce text that is closest to South Wallachian Romany, a commonly used online variant. But it also mixes elements from others, such as Northern Wallachian and Balkan Romani.
In 2022, Google added 24 new languages for translation using what’s called Zero-Shot Machine Translation, where a machine learning model can translate into another language without seeing an example. He also introduced 1000 Languages Initiativewhich aims to build AI models to support the 1,000 most spoken languages.
“As technology advances and as we continue to partner with expert linguists and native speakers, we will support even more language varieties and spelling conventions over time,” Caswell said in the release.
You can access Google Translate at translate.google.comor through Android and iOS mobile apps.
Google is one of many tech companies using AI to improve its offerings. It has incorporated the technology into platforms such as Gmail, Search and Messagesand make AI main focus of its I/IO event In May. Contestants like An apple and Microsoft have similarly woven AI into their products and services, with Apple earlier this month unveiling a suite of “Apple Intelligence” updates coming to iPhone.
Read more: AI was Google’s biggest “product” at I/O. Technical notes will never be the same
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