Google has announced that one of their most popular applications and feature, Google Translate will be introducing their services to 24 more languages which also includes 8 languages from India. The company announced the big update during their conference on May the 11th. With this new addition, Google Translate now works on 133 languages from across the globe.
Google Translate already has support for Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, and Malayalam which are widely spoken in the country. Now they can appeal to even more Indians as they have support for languages like Bhojpuri, Sanskrit, Assamese, Dogri (a language popular in Jammu and Kashmir), Konkani (a wildly spoken language in Goa and the west coast), Maithili (a language spoken in Bihar), Meitei Lon (a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Manipur), and Mizo (a language spoken in Mizoram).
The tech giants also said that they will be increasing the number of languages supported in South America. They already had support for languages like Spanish and Portuguese, but now they have support for Quechua (a language spoken in Peru), Guarani (which is widely spoken in Bolivia and Paraguay), and Aymara (an official language of Bolivia).
They have also added a whole sleuth of African languages. Africa has always been under represented in online resources and now, Google has added support for 10 languages from the continent. This includes Krio, a west African language, Lingala (spoken in DRC), Luganda (Spoken in Uganda and parts of Rwanda), Bambara (spoken in West Africa especially Mali), Ewe (spoken in the costal countries of Togo and Ghana), Oromo (spoken in the east in Ethiopia and Kenya), Sepedi (the only South African addition), Tigrinya (Spoken on the east coast tip of Eritrea), Tsonga (spoken in Mozambique and South Africa primarily), and Twi (a native Ghanaian language).
The company has even added an eclectic set of Asian languages other than the 8 Indian ones. This includes Kurdish (spoken in Kurdistan, Iraq), Ilocano (spoken in the northern Filipino islands), and Dhivehi (a native Maldivian language).
With these new additions, the tech giants will now have access to so many more potential customers as close to a billion people call these languages as their mother tongue.
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Alphabet said that it is very difficult to translate languages that are underrepresented in the world scale but that is what Google is all about; being the torch bearers for innovation.
