Google Translate Adds 110 Languages in AI-Powered Expansion

Google has unveiled its largest-ever expansion of Translate, adding 110 new languages powered by its PaLM 2 AI model. The update spans major world languages and endangered tongues, covering an additional 614 million speakers globally.

Highlights include Cantonese, long-requested by users, and a quarter of the new offerings from Africa. Some additions, like Manx from the Isle of Man, showcase dramatic revival stories. The expansion reflects Google's ambitious "1,000 Languages Initiative" and follows its 2022 addition of 24 languages using zero-shot machine translation. Challenges in implementation included navigating regional varieties and non-standardized forms, the company wrote in a blog post.

Will they fix the existing languages?

[_merlin]

How about they fix the existing languages before they add more? Google Translate falls in a heap for languages where pronouns depend on the speaker's relationship to the listener (e.g. Viet and Korean). It struggles with Japanese grammar. It can't even get "is"/"is not" right reliably when translating Japanese to English. If anything it's become worse in the last five years.

They're in good company, though. I tried Samsung's "AI-powered" on-device translation for a laugh, and it's just as broken as Google Translate.

Re:

[TokyoJimu]

I don't think there's much they can do about languages that don't use pronouns (like Japanese) or use them as they do in Vietnamese. There is no way for the translation engine to figure out who is talking about whom.

Context is a thing

[_merlin]

For a single sentence it can be ambiguous, but even with multiple sentences where it's obvious Google Translate can't get it right.

Re:

[shanen]

Mod parent up, though context should be considered even more broadly. Often extends beyond the text at hand.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

That's what they are trying to fix here. This update isn't just adding more languages, it is improving the already supported ones.

Their translation system does look for context clues to help with things like pronouns and the meaning of words. For example, if you say in English "poor girl", it could mean that you feel sympathy for some misfortune that has befallen her, or you are saying she doesn't have much money. Even a human translator can't figure that out without additional context.

It helps if you under

Re:

[Fudoka]

It's not that long ago Translate missed "" in Greek to English so "Don't turn the current on" became "Turn the current on" :). It's somewhat better now but the Greek -> English still frequently needs a lot of imagination to make sense of the English.

google has so much going on

[FudRucker]

that maybe they should be broken up, separate the search & email from android operating system, and app store separated from the android operating system, i hear about all this stuff google is doing and it makes me wonder if google is just a giant spaghetti bowl with all this different things in it making a huge mess, look how google search went from the best to the worst for an example

Re:

[registrations_suck]

YEAH, NO.

Lots of companies are involved in "a lot of stuff".

Look at a company like Hitachi. They are all over the place, from Financial Solutions to Control Systems, Heavy Industrial Equipment, air nailers and other hand tools, a variety of IT products, etc.

I wonder

[registrations_suck]

I wonder how much further humanity would have advanced if everyone was speaking the same language the whole time.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess Nimrod ruined it for all of us...

Re:

[A10Mechanic]

Like on Star Trek, everyone speaks the same language each week and they're pretty advanced.

Re:

[registrations_suck]

And with no accents either.

Re:

[LazarusQLong]

well, except Scotty, he has a pretty pronounced accent

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

To Scotty, the rest of the crew have pretty pronounced accents, don't you mean?

Re:

[LazarusQLong]

Ay, you've got me there, Matey.

Re:

[dvice]

What do you mean with the "same language"? Even if you have two people speaking English, they might still not understand each other. For example, when climate scientist say that Earth temperature is rising by a few degrees people can understand this by:
- A) Oh, how nice that it will be a little warmer.
- B) Oh, all the fish in the sea will die, most animals will die, half of human population will die and most of the land area will become a dead zone.

There would obviously be some advantages if we would speak

Re:

[cascadingstylesheet]

I wonder how much further humanity would have advanced if everyone was speaking the same language the whole time.

Depends on what they would be advancing to [wikipedia.org] :)

Re:

[codeButcher]

You'll find a number of articles on the internet along the lines how differences in languages provide people with a different outlook on life. (I'm too lazy to find any since I'm going on lunch.) There is probably no single "perfect" outlook, though. Certainly Anglophones do not have it, even if many on both sides of the Atlantic believe they do... If you care about the whole "diversity is our strength" spiel, preserving languages and their speaker communities would be probably a necessary way to achieve th

Outrage over offensive translation in 3, 2, 1...

[Opportunist]

I mean, you just know it will happen.

The Big Fallacy

[business_kid]

Do you believe everything you read online?

If AI believes everything in the LLMs (and it seems to), then the results will always be poor.
The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.

Amazin'!

[bill_mcgonigle]

So much work goes into these.

To launch them all together is a fine bit of coordination too.

Congrats to the whole team.

How about a few more...

[VeryFluffyBunny]

...Englishes & Spanishes then? British, US, South African, Indian, & Australian Englishes are all quite distinct; they have different vocabularies & the same words, expressions, & forms often have different meanings across different Englishes: Do you think many people in the USA regularly "lay the table"? The same for Spanishes, when's the last time a Colombian or Argentinian "ha cogido un taxi"?

& yet Google treats them as if there's only one English & one Spanish. If you're not u

Re:

[codeButcher]

I work (remotely) for a Munich-based company and our software has translations for over a dozen languages. They chose to include bar too, just as a quirk (although some of our clients now use it for everyday operation, so not so quirky any more).

We have an in-house AI front-end to some LLMs that we use to push out all the required translations for new strings (it does warn that there is no official orthography or grammar for Bavarian, "use at own risk". And one can see the differences if repeating translat