Google Translate now includes Portuguese from Portugal (and 110 other languages)
The tech giant’s service now includes in its catalog the languages with the largest number of speakers in the world, including Cantonese.
As of Thursday, June 27, it is now possible to distinguish Portuguese from Portugal and Portuguese from Brazil via Google Translate. The multinational company has announced the “largest ever expansion” of its translation tool by implementing 110 new languages.
“Now, we’re using AI to expand the range of supported languages,” the giant says in an online post. Thanks to the PaLM 2 language model, the new languages have more than 614 million speakers, “enabling translation for about 8 percent of the world’s population.”
One of the highlights is the addition of Cantonese, which has more than 85 million speakers worldwide. The company is also highlighting Manx, a Celtic language from the Isle of Man, which was nearly extinct after the last native speaker died in 1974.
A quarter of the new languages originate in Africa, including Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda, and Wolof. Another addition is Afar, a tonal language spoken in Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, which “received the highest number of volunteer contributions from the community,” according to Google.
In 2022, Google has already added 24 new languages through zero-based machine translation. In the same year, it announced the Mil Línguas initiative, a “commitment to building AI models [inteligência artificial] Which will support the 1000 most spoken languages in the world.”
Languages “have enormous diversity: regional varieties, dialects, and different spelling patterns,” and in fact, “many languages do not have a standard format, so it is impossible to choose the ‘right’ variety,” North concludes.
“Friendly zombie fanatic. Analyst. Coffee buff. Professional music specialist. Communicator.”
