Google Adds 13 New Languages

Travellers can now translate speech in real-time in a total of 103 languages, with new additions including Scots Gaelic, Corsican, Kurdish, Samoan and Hawaiian.

The addition means that Google Translate can now provide machine learning-based translations to about 99 percent of the world’s online population.

“The 13 new languages…help bring a combined 120 million new people to the billions who can already communicate with Translate all over the world,” Sveta Kelman, senior program manager for Google Translate, wrote in a blog post.

Google Translate first launched in 2006 – originally between English and Arabic, Chinese and Russian – and as at December 2014, the medium supported up to 90 languages, 20 more were added in the summer of 2015.

Google says the 13 new additions will help another 120 million people communicate with the rest of the world online.
Meanwhile, the addition of Luxembourgish completes Google’s list of official EU languages covered by Translate.

“We’ve come a long way with over 100 languages, but we aren’t done yet,” Kelman wrote, encouraging more people to get involved with Translation Community.

Statistics show that there are around 7,000 different spoken languages in the world, however, 2,000 of these have fewer than 1,000 speakers and 90 percent are used by less than 100,000 people.

The 13 new languages are:

Amharic – Amharic (Ethiopia) is the second most widely spoken Semitic language after Arabic.

Corsican – Corsican (Island of Corsica, France) is closely related to Italian and was Napoleon’s first language.

Frisian – Frisian (Netherlands and Germany) is the native language of over half the inhabitants of the Friesland province of the Netherlands.

Kyrgyz – Kyrgyz (Kyrgyzstan) is the language of the Epic of Manas, which is 20 times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey put together.

Hawaiian – Hawaiian (Hawaii) has lent several words to the English language, such as ukulele and wiki.

Kurdish (Kurmanji) – Kurdish (Kurmanji) (Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria) is written with Latin letters while the others two varieties of Kurdish are written with Arabic script.

Luxembourgish – Luxembourgish (Luxembourg) completes the list of official EU languages Translate covers.

Samoan – Samoan (Samoa and American Samoa) is written using only 14 letters.

Scots Gaelic – Scots Gaelic was introduced by Irish settlers in the 4th Century AD.

Shona – Shona (Zimbabwe) is the most widely spoken of the hundreds of languages in the Bantu family.

Sindhi – Sindhi (Pakistan and India) was the native language of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the “Father of the Nation” of Pakistan.

Pashto – Pashto (Afghanistan and Pakistan) is written in Perso-Arabic script with an additional 12 letters, for a total of 44.

Xhosa – Xhosa (South Africa) is the second most common native language in the country after Afrikaans and features three kinds of clicks, represented by the letters x, q and c.