Google Translate announces 110 new languages including Iban, Malay in Jawi script, Minang
Published on: Friday, June 28, 2024
By: Jessie Lee
From Cantonese to Qʼeqchiʼ, these new languages represent more than 614 million speakers, opening up translations for around 8% of the world’s population, said an official. (LinkedIn pic)
Kota Kinabalu: Google Translate has announced the addition of 110 languages including Iban, Minang, Cantonese and Malay in Jawi script in its services.
Its Senior Software Engineer Isaac Caswell said this is their largest expansion ever with their next-generation language model “PaLM 2” following the addition of 24 languages with “Zero-Shot Machine Translation”.
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He said the “1,000 Languages Initiative” announced previously is a commitment to building AI models that will support the 1,000 most spoken languages around the world.
“We are always applying the latest technologies so more people can access this tool,” he said in an article published on Google’s official blog “The Keyword” on Thursday.
“From Cantonese to Qʼeqchiʼ, these new languages represent more than 614 million speakers, opening up translations for around 8% of the world’s population.
“Some are major world languages with over 100 million speakers. Others are spoken by small communities of indigenous people, and a few have almost no native speakers but active revitalisation efforts.”
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He also explained that Cantonese has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate.
“Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it’s tricky to find data and train models,” he said.
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