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Google Translate Adds Support for 110 More Languages, Nearly Doubling Its Offerings

• ByStartupStory     |    June 29, 2024

Google announced yesterday that its popular translation service, Google Translate, is expanding to support an additional 110 languages. This significant enhancement nearly doubles the number of languages previously available, bringing the total to 243.

The expansion was made possible by Google’s PaLM 2 AI large language model, which demonstrated exceptional proficiency in learning new languages. This includes languages closely related to others, such as Awadhi and Marwari, which are similar to Hindi, and French creoles, which are close to Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole.

Isaac Caswell, a senior software engineer at Google, shared in a blog post that these new languages are spoken by more than 614 million people worldwide, accounting for approximately 8 percent of the global population. He highlighted the significance of this update, noting that “about a quarter of the languages were African,” and described it as their “latest expansion of African languages to date.”

Among the newly supported languages is Cantonese, which has been a long-standing request from users. Caswell acknowledged the challenges in adding Cantonese due to its overlap with Mandarin in writing, which made data collection difficult. However, this update marks a major achievement in making Google Translate more inclusive and accessible.

Google’s ambitious goal is to eventually support 1,000 languages through the use of advanced AI technologies, demonstrating their commitment to breaking down language barriers across the globe.

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