Google announced in its blog post that this significant upgrade covers languages ​​spoken by over 614 million people worldwide, which is about 8% of the global population. The diversity is great, including languages ​​with over 100 million speakers as well as precious dialects of indigenous communities.

Even languages ​​with no current native speakers are included, demonstrating Google's commitment to preserving endangered languages.

In addition to this impressive update, Google specifically focused on African languages, which account for about a quarter of the new additions. Languages ​​such as Fona, Kikonga, Lua, Ga, Swatija, Vende and Wolof are now part of Google Translate, marking the biggest advance in African language support to date.

Google's advanced language model PaLM 2 played a key role in this extension. It learns related languages, allowing the addition of languages ​​such as Awadi and Marwadi, similar to Hindi, as well as French Creole languages ​​such as Seychellois and Mauritian.

Adding widely used languages ​​such as Cantonese comes with its own challenges due to shared written characters with Mandarin. However, Google's commitment to linguistic diversity is undeniable. An example is the inclusion of Manx, a Celtic language from the Isle of Man that almost disappeared in 1974. Thanks to revitalization efforts, the number of fluent speakers of the language has grown into the thousands.

This expansion also includes the Punjabi language written in the Shahmuki script, a Persian-Arabic variant used in Pakistan, where it is one of the most widely spoken languages.

Google recognizes that translating languages ​​is complex due to regional variations, dialects, and differences in spelling. Some languages, such as Romani, with its many dialects, do not have one standard form, which makes translation challenging.

Before this expansion, Google Translate's biggest update was in May 2022 with the introduction of Zero-Shot machine translation. This technology allows the model to learn new languages ​​without the need for existing translated examples, which was a significant step forward in machine translation, helping Google overcome language barriers.

This expansion represents a significant step towards Google's 1,000 Languages ​​Initiative, which aims to use AI models to support the world's 1,000 most important languages.