Published on: July 03, 2024 09:25 (EAT)
Google Translate icon displayed on a phone screen and Google logo displayed in the background. (Photo by AFP)
The Alphabet-owned tech giant announced
that it is expanding the pool of languages Google Translate supports by rolling
out 110 new languages to the service.
The new update uses Artificial Intelligence
(AI) and is driven by Google’s PaLM 2 large language model, which also powers
the company’s AI chatbot, Bard.
Among the other new languages Google
Translate will support are Awadhi, Cantonese and Marwari.
Google senior software engineer Isaac
Caswell said that about a quarter of the languages are African. He called it
their “latest expansion of African languages to date.”
The Luo comprise several Nilotic ethnic
groups found across Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Northern Uganda, eastern
DRC, western Kenya and a part of Tanzania.
The Joluo people consider themselves ‘Luo proper’ and their Dholuo language is spoken by about 4.2 million
Luo people in Kenya and Tanzania.
Caswell said for such languages with dialects,
varieties and spelling standards, Google Translate “will tend to output the
most common variety found online, but will also mix between varieties.”
“The models will certainly make some silly
mistakes in translation, but each one of them has gone through testing and
evaluation with native speakers. They are all ‘generally useful and right most
of the time’, and community members have emphasized that they are useful!” the
engineer wrote on X.
The latest update brings to 243 the number
of languages Translate currently supports as Google works towards building AI
models that will support the 1,000 world’s most spoken languages.