Google’s language-translation tool Google Translate has been recently updated with 24 new languages added to its list to take the total number of supported languages across the globe to 133. Along with Sanskrit, the newly added 24 languages include other Indian languages Assamese, Maithili, Konkani, Mizo, Dogri, Meiteilon which is Manipuri, and Bhojpuri. Now a total 19 of Indian languages are available on the language-translation platform of the big tech giant Google.
According to a report by Economic Times, Isaac Caswell, senior software engineer at Google Research, said, “Sanskrit is the number one, most requested language at Google Translate, and we are finally adding it. We are also adding the first languages from northeast India, which is another rather underrepresented place.”
The latest update has text translation facilities for the 19 Indian languages in all. The company will be working on rolling out voice to text, camera mode, and other features very soon. The latest update though does not cover all the 22 scheduled Indian languages. About this, Isaac Caswell said, “We have significantly closed the gap for at least the scheduled languages.”
“Sanskrit is the number one, most-requested language at Google Translate and we are finally adding it” says Google Research.
— Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar (@mamidala90) May 12, 2022
Courtesy: The Economic Times @EconomicTimes pic.twitter.com/DWFFQzyDgS
He further said, “We are working on other features too, but they are not yet supported for all of these languages. We are trying to understand (the problems) better, and hopefully get our model to shift towards more colloquial output rather than this old-fashioned or stilted type of thing. But we know there are other issues as well that we are trying to get our fingers on more closely.”
The recently added languages in Google Translate are the first ones that have been added using the zero-shot machine translation technology. In this technique, the machine learning model only sees monolingual text. It learns to translate into another language without even seeing an example.
Isaac Caswell said about this, “While this technology is impressive, it isn’t perfect. And we’ll keep improving these models to deliver the same experience you’re used to with a Spanish or German translation, for example.”
According to a report by India Today, Sanskrit is used by around 20000 people in India. However, being the source of most of the languages in the Indo-European class, bringing Sanskrit to the Google Translate platform holds importance. Among other languages, 25 million people use Assamese, 50 million people use Bhojpuri, 3 million people use Dogri, 2 million people use Konkani, 34 million people use Maithili, 2 million people use Manipuri and around 0.83 million people use Mizo language.
The list of newly added languages contains 16 other languages from different parts of the world.
