In a groundbreaking move, Google has harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to expand its Translate service, adding support for 110 new languages. This monumental update includes languages like Cantonese, Punjabi (Shahmukhi), and NKo, significantly broadening the service’s reach. Approximately a quarter of these languages originate from Africa, collectively representing 614 million speakers — about eight percent of the global population.

Google attributes this achievement to its advanced language model, PaLM 2. “PaLM 2 has been crucial in enabling Translate to efficiently learn languages closely related to one another,” says Isaac Caswell, Senior Software Engineer at Google Translate. This includes languages similar to Hindi, such as Awadhi and Marwadi, as well as French creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole. Caswell emphasizes the ongoing collaboration with expert linguists and native speakers, aiming to support even more language varieties and spelling conventions in the future.

The last significant language update for Google Translate was in May 2022, utilizing Zero-Shot Machine Translation, a method allowing the model to learn new languages without direct examples. This update is part of Google’s broader initiative, the 1,000 Languages Initiative, which aims to support the most widely spoken languages globally through AI.