Saturday, December 13, 2014

10 new languages in Google Translate (Chichewa, Malagasy, Sesotho, Malayalam, Burmese, Sinhalese, Sundanese, Kazakh, Tajik, Uzbek)

As you know, Google keeps changing the set of services it offers.  Sometimes things are removed for simplicity or cost reasons, but sometimes things are also added to the mix. 

Just this week, Google Translate added 10 new languages for translation:
  • Chichewa (Chinyanja) is spoken by 12 million people in Malawi and surrounding countries.
  • Malagasy is spoken by 18 million people in Madagascar, where it is the national language. (It is one of only a few languages that is VOS, that is, it puts the verb first in sentences, followed by the object and then the subject.)
  • Sesotho has 6 million native speakers. It is the national language of Lesotho and one of 11 official languages in South Africa.

In India and Southeast Asia, Google adds Malayalam, Burmese, Sinhala, and Sundanese:

  • Malayalam (മലയാളം), with 38 million native speakers, is a major language in India and one of that country’s 6 classical languages.
  • Myanmar (Burmese, မြန်မာစာ) is the official language of Myanmar with 33 million native speakers. Myanmar language has been in the works for a long time as it's a challenging language for automatic translation, both from language structure and font encoding perspectives.
  • Sinhala (Sinhalese, සිංහල) is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka and natively spoken by 16 million people. In September the local community in Sri Lanka organized Sinhala Translate Week, contributing tens of thousands of translations to the Google translation system.
  • Sundanese (Basa Sunda) is spoken on the island of Java in Indonesia by 39 million people.

In Central Asia, Google is adding Kazakh, Tajik, and Uzbek:

  • Kazakh (Қазақ тілі) with 11 million native speakers in Kazakhstan.
  • Tajik (Тоҷикӣ), a close relative to modern Persian, is spoken by more than 4 million people in Tajikistan and beyond.
  • Uzbek (Oʻzbek tili) is spoken by 25 million people in Uzbekistan. The Uzbek dictionary by Shavkat Butaev is also now available.













4 comments:

  1. Chichewa has been added as to the language drop down menu on the translate.google.com site, but do not see it in the language drop down menu of the google translate short cut menu when right clicking the mouse on any web page.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Chichewa has been added as to the language drop down menu on the translate.google.com site, but do not see it in the language drop down menu of the google translate short cut menu when right clicking the mouse on any web page.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Glad to hear that my mother tongue (Malayalam) also included in Google translate.

    ReplyDelete