Google is adding support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, the company announced on Thursday. Before now, Google Translate supported 133 languages, so this expansion — which the company says is its biggest ever — marks a significant jump.
Google’s PaLM 2 AI language model helped Translate learn these new languages. It was especially good at learning ones that were related to one another, such as languages “close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi, and French creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole,” Google’s Isaac Caswell says in a blog post.
The list of newly-supported languages in Translate includes Cantonese, which “has long been one of the most requested languages for Google Translate,” Caswell says. “Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it is tricky to find data and train models.” Caswell also says that “about a quarter of the new languages come from Africa.”
Most of the new languages are spoken by at least one million people, Caswell tells The Verge in an interview, while “several” are spoken by hundreds of millions of people.