Fri. Nov 15th, 2024

No Nigerian language is included this time in a list that already has Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa.

Google Translate has added 24 new languages to its existing register, making it 133 the number of languages it can intepret using its algorithms.

The firm listed languages indigenous to Africa, India and the Americas spoken by 300 million people.

Some of the new African languages in the list are spoken Ghana, Togo, Sierra Leone, Mali, South Africa, Eritrea, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Namibia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

No Nigerian language was included this time. The translator already supports Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa.

The new list includes Assamese, used by about 25 million people in Northeast India, Aymara, spoken by about 2 million people in Bolivia, Chile and Peru Bambara, native to about 14 million people in Mali.

Google said the new languages are the first to use Zero-Shot Machine Translation, in which a machine learning model only sees monolingual text and learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example.

Google admitted that the technology is not perfect.

“This is also a technical milestone for Google Translate,” Isaac Caswell, a senior software engineer, Google Translate.

Here’s a full list of the new languages now available in Google Translate:

Assamese, used by about 25 million people in Northeast India

Aymara, used by about two million people in Bolivia, Chile and Peru

Bambara, used by about 14 million people in Mali

Bhojpuri, used by about 50 million people in northern India, Nepal and Fiji

Dhivehi, used by about 300,000 people in the Maldives