Google Translate Arrival Of 24 New Languages, Reach 300 Million People In The World

JAKARTA - Google Translate is getting back an additional 24 languages to its service. The company says the full list of new supported languages includes dialects spoken by 300 million people worldwide

Among the newly available languages are Sanskrit, Tsonga and Sorani Kurdish. One of the new additions, Assamese, is used by some 25 million people in Northeast India. Others, such as Dhivehi, are spoken by about 300,000 people in the Maldives.

According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the expansion will allow the company to cover languages spoken by more than 300 million people and bring the total number of languages supported by Google Translate to 133.

The company says the new language is brought in using Zero-Shot Machine Translation technology. This system allows Google to create machine learning models that only look at monolingual text.

Launching Engadget, Thursday, May 12, Google claims the model is like learning to translate into another language without ever seeing an example.

However, Google admits the approach is not perfect, but the company will continue to develop the technology so that it can provide the same experience with languages like Spanish and German.

The last time Google added a large number of languages to its Translate service was in 2020 when the company updated the tool to support Kinyarwanda, Odia, Tatar, Turkmen, and Uyghur.

The tech giant still has a job of its own. It is estimated that there are more than 7,151 spoken languages globally. However, today's additions can help people communicate in situations where they couldn't.