This Thursday, Google announced that it is introducing 110 new languages to Google Translate, the technology’s translation tool, which is the “biggest expansion ever”, including Portuguese from Portugal.
By 2022, Google has added 24 new languages using “zero-shot” machine translation, where a machine learning model learns to translate into another language without even seeing an example, and announced the “1,000 Languages Initiative,” a commitment to building AI models [inteligência artificial] which will support the 1,000 most widely spoken languages in the world,” Google reminds.
“We’re now using AI to expand the range of languages we support,” and “thanks to our incredible PaLM 2 language model, we’re starting to introduce 110 new languages to Google Translate, our biggest expansion ever, including Portuguese from Portugal,” he tells the online publication.
In other words, Google Translate will now differentiate between Portuguese variants (Portugal and Brazil).
“From Cantonese to Q’eqchi, these new languages are spoken by more than 614 million people, translating approximately 8% of the world’s population,” Google says.
About a quarter of the new languages “are from Africa and represent our largest expansion of African languages to date, including Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda and Wolof,” he adds.
Among the languages currently supported by Google Translate is Afar, a tonal language spoken in Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. “Of all the languages involved in this launch, Afar had the most community contributions,” he points out.
Then comes Cantonese, which has long been “one of the most requested languages on Google Translate.”
Other examples are Manx, the Celtic language of the Isle of Man which almost became extinct after the death of its last speaker in 1974, but “thanks to an island-wide revival movement, it is now spoken by thousands of people”, and Nko, a standardized form of the Manding languages of West Africa , uniting many dialects into a common language.
“Its unique alphabet was invented in 1949, and today there is an active research community that is developing resources and technologies for it,” Google said in a statement.
There is also Punjabi (Shahmukhi), a variety of Punjabi written in the Perso-Arabic script (Shahmukhi), which is the most widely spoken language in Pakistan, Tamazight, a Berber language spoken in North Africa, and Tok Pisin, “a Creole English in origin and the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea.”
Languages ”have enormous diversity: regional varieties, dialects, different spelling patterns” and, in fact, “many languages do not have a standard format, so it is impossible to choose the ‘right’ variant.”
But “our approach was to prioritize the most commonly used variants of each language,” he adds.
“PaLM 2 has been a key piece in this puzzle, helping translators more effectively learn languages that are closely related to each other, including languages close to Hindi such as Awadhi and Marwadi, and French creole languages such as Seychelles Creole and Mauritian Creole “, he explains.
And as technology advances, “and we continue to collaborate with experienced linguists and native speakers, we will support even more language varieties and spellings over time.”