Google today announced that it is adding support for 110 languages to its translation service, and the company is using the PaLM 2 AI model to power the translations.
These languages include Afar, Cantonese, Manx, Nko, Punjabi (Shamukhi), Tamazight (Amazight) and Tok Pisin. The company claims that the newly added languages are spoken by more than 614 million people, roughly 8% of the world's population.
Google noted that these languages are at different stages of use: some have 100 million speakers, others have no active speakers, but people are working to preserve them.
Google said it takes into account factors such as regional variants, dialects and different spelling standards when adding support for languages.
“Our approach is to prioritize the most commonly used dialects of each language. For example, Romani is a language with many dialects across Europe. Our model produces text that is closest to Southern Vlax Romani as commonly used online, but with elements of other dialects mixed in, including Northern Vlax Romani and Balkan Romani,” Isaac Caswell, a Google software engineer, said in a statement.
The addition of 110 languages to Google Translate is part of its initiative to support 1,000 languages through AI announced in 2022. That same year, the company added support for 24 languages spoken by over 300 million people through a one-shot model. With the latest addition, Google Translate now supports 243 languages.
At WWDC, Apple announced that it would be adding support for Hindi to its Translate app, but compared to Google, Apple Translate only supports a little over 20 languages.