Google Translate has recently announced that it is expanding its language support to include over 110 new languages. This move marks the biggest expansion ever for the translation service, which previously supported 133 languages. The addition of these new languages was made possible by Google’s PaLM 2 AI language model, which helped Translate learn languages that are closely related to each other.
According to Google, the newly supported languages include Cantonese, a language that has been highly requested by users for a long time. Google’s Isaac Caswell mentioned that Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, making it challenging to find data and train models for translation. Additionally, about a quarter of the new languages added to Translate are from Africa.
Caswell revealed that most of the new languages are spoken by at least one million people, with some spoken by hundreds of millions. This expansion is a significant step forward for Google Translate in making language support more inclusive and accessible to a wide range of users worldwide.
