Lest you think that there are only just a handful of languages that need to be translated by Google, in fact there are thousands of spoken and written ones all over the world. And while some of them are only spoken by a handful, Google’s commitment is to make it easier for people to communicate with others, no matter what language they use. So they’re announcing the addition of 13 more languages in the Google Translate program, which now gives people access to more than a hundred different languages available there.

The 13 new languages are: Amharic, Corsican, Frisian, Kyrgyz, Hawaiian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Luxembourgish, Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Shona, Sindhi, Pashto and Xhosa. Google even brings a trivia for each of the new additions, including the fact that Corsican was Napoleon’s first language or that Kyrgyz is the language of the Epic of Manas, a book that makes the Illiad and Odyssey look like a Cliffnotes book or that Samoan is written using only 14 letters.

Google also explains the thinking behind what languages they add and what they do. The basic criteria is that it should be a written language and that there are already a significant amount of translation found on the web. Then Google uses a combination of machine learning (training machines to identify statistical patterns and at a massively huge scale), licensed content, and also from the Translate Community. And that community is a pretty vibrant one, with over 3 million people contributing to around 200 million translated words.

Of course since there are thousands of languages, this means that Google’s work is far from over. They are encouraging people to join the Translate Community if they want to contribute to this undertaking.

SOURCE: Google Translate

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