Google announced on Thursday that it is expanding Google Translate's support to 110 additional languages. Google Translate was previously available in 133 languages, so this expansion—which the firm claims is its largest ever—represents a substantial improvement.
Translate was assisted in learning these new languages by Google's PaLM 2 AI language model. According to a blog post by Google's Isaac Caswell, it was particularly effective at learning languages that were connected to one another, such as those "close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi, and French creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole."
Cantonese, which "has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate," is included in the list of newly supported languages in Translate, according to Caswell. Cantonese and Mandarin frequently overlap in writing, thus finding data and training models can be challenging.
Additionally, according to Caswell, "roughly a quarter of the new languages come from Africa." According to Caswell, "several" of the new languages are spoken by hundreds of millions of people, but the majority are spoken by at least one million people, The Verge reports in an interview.
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