Google adds 24 languages to its translator

Google will incorporate into its translator 24 languages that are not “represented in most technologies,” including Guarani, Aymara and Quechua. The news was well received by referents and members of indigenous peoples, who fight to preserve their history and make themselves visible in communication spaces dominated by majority languages. In this way, the tool will have 133 languages in which “more than 300 million people speak”. Other languages they will add will be Mizo, used by around 800,000 people in India’s far northeast, and Lingala, used by more than 45 million people in Central Africa, according to the company’s announcement Wednesday at its annual developer conference.

We’re adding 24 new languages to Google Translate — the first using a breakthrough machine learning approach called Zero-Shot Machine Translation, where the model learns a new language without ever seeing a direct translation of it. #GoogleIO https://t.co/5Imnj6ff1E — Google (@Google)
May 11, 2022

The technology behind the advancement of Google Translate is Zero-Shot, the tool learns to translate into another language without ever having seen an example before. However, despite the innovation that Zero-Shot entails, it still requires further growth to optimize. This implies that the translations carried out by the system in these languages can become very good but not perfect. The update will be seen in the coming days or weeks, but the date is not yet known precisely, given that it is a worldwide launch and the news comes as the service is updated. 
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Original source in Spanish