Google Translate will now support 24 new languages, including eight new Indian languages, the internet giant announced on May 11 at Google IO 2022, its annual developer conference.
The total number of languages supported by the translation service now stands at 133.
Assamese, Bhojpuri, Sanskrit, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), and Mizo are among the new Indian languages being introduced.
As part of this update, Google is also adding Quechua (Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador), Guarani (Paraguay and Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil), and Aymara (Bolivia, Chile, and Peru), as well as an English-based dialect Krio (Sierra Leone) to the service for the first time.
List of languages
The list of languages also includes Lingala (Democratic Republic of Congo), Luganda (Uganda and Rwanda), Bambara (Mali), Dhivehi (Maldives), Ewe (Ghana and Togo), Guarani (Paraguay and Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil), Ilocano (northern Philippines), Kurdish (Iraq), Oromo (Ethiopia and Kenya), Sepedi (South Africa), Tigrinya (Eritrea and Ethiopia), Tsonga (Eswatini, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe) and Twi (Ghana). Overall, 300 million people use these 24 languages as their first or second language, the company said.
Google also stated that these are the first languages added using a translation technique known as Zero-Shot Machine Translation, in which the machine learning model learns to translate into another language by only seeing texts in one language and never seeing an example translation.