14 DAY TRIAL // Google Translate, while far from perfect, is becoming increasingly used and can be just the tool for the job in certain situations, like in trying to understand a website or a text without needing a professional level translation. Now Google is opening the tool to new set of users as it has introduced an additional nine languages to its product, bringing the total to 51. With the new languages, the service now offers 2,550 possible translation combinations between any two languages supported.
“[Google Translate] can help you find and translate local restaurant and hotel reviews into your language when planning a vacation abroad, allow you to read the Spanish or French Editions of Google News, communicate with people who speak different languages using Google Translate chat bots, and more,” Franz Och, principal scientist for Google Translate, wrote. “We're especially excited to announce that we've added 9 new languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish, bringing the number of languages we support from 42 to 51.“
With the additional languages Google now boasts it supports all 23 official languages in the European Union. As part of the announcement, the Internet giant decided to give users a little glimpse into how the languages that get support are chosen. The Translate project is actually working on more than 100 languages at the time internally, gradually developing the required data sets until the translation meets a number of quality requirements. So deciding which language gets official support is more or less an automated process and depends largely on translated documents and other sources that Google can get a hold of from which the system can learn.
While machine translations are fairly limited at the moment, the search giant has started introducing the technology to other products beyond the core product, allowing Google Reader to automatically translate RSS/Atom feeds or Gmail to translate emails, for example. Very recently the company has introduced the feature in Docs, enabling users to convert documents between any two languages while retaining the original formatting.