Google announced today that it has added nine new languages to Google Translate. That brings the total number of languages supported up to 51, as well as 2,550 language pairs, including all 23 official EU languages.
“We spend a lot of time thinking about how information travels around the globe. After all, there are Googlers living and working in dozens of countries — and we’re pretty sure our products are used in many more,” says Google Translate Product Manager Jeff Chin. “So we’re familiar with the need to translate information across borders, and we’ve been working hard to build the technology to enable you to do just that.”
The nine new languages are:
– Afrikaans
– Belarusian
– Icelandic
– Irish
– Macedonian
– Malay
– Swahili
– Welsh
– Yiddish
“The translation quality of these newest languages is still a little rough, but it will improve over time — and we’re continuously working to improve quality for all languages supported by Google Translate,” says Chin.
Google collects data and builds systems for over 100 languages, and when a set of languages meets Google’s quality guidelines, they consider it for their next language launch. The set of languages Google develops is largely tied to the amount of pages with that language on the web.
Google is also working to integrate Google Translate into other products. So far, it is already supported by Gmail, Google Toolbar, Google Reader, and Google Docs. However, the nine new languages are not available in these products yet, although they will be soon.
