Google Translate Adds Support for Five Indian Languages

Google Translate is a great tool in many occasions when you only need to understand something, a web page, some lyrics and so on, not to get a professional translation. This is why the addition of five Indian languages to Google Translate is a great step forward even though, the support is far more error-prone than for other languages.

"Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google Translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu," Ashish Venugopal, Research Scientist at Google, wrote.

"In India and Bangladesh alone, more than 500 million people speak these five languages. Since 2009, we’ve launched a total of 11 alpha languages, bringing the current number of languages supported by Google Translate to 63," Google explained.

With 63 languages now supported by Google Translate, to varying degrees, the site is clearly one of the most powerful translation tool to have ever been available.

While there are a lot more languages in the world, this should mean that the vast majority of content available online can be translated, at least to some degree, using the Google tool.

The implications of this are huge, right now the web is dominated by two languages, Chinese and English, and, while these two are going to continue to grow, the web will become a lot more diverse as more and more people come online.

And tools to enable new users to understand most of the content out there or to enable the world to understand what these emerging web ecosystems are saying and creating will be even more important than they are now.

And, by that time, Google Translate will only become better. The tool relies on machine learning and translation, meaning that it needs a lot of content available in at least two languages to learn from what the human translators have done.

This is why there is much better support for English and other languages that are very present online rather than the five new Indian languages just introduced, for example.