By Antynet Ford
Google Translate will now support the Luo language after Google gave the online translation service its biggest language support update yet.
The Alphabet-owned tech behemoth announced that it is adding 110 new languages to Google Translate.
The latest upgrade employs artificial intelligence (AI) and is powered by Google’s PaLM 2 big language model, which also powers the company’s AI chatbot, Bard.
Other additional languages that Google Translate will handle are Awadhi, Cantonese, and Marwari.
According to Google senior software engineer Isaac Caswell, around 25% of the languages are African. He described it as the “latest expansion of African languages to date.”
The Luo are a collection of Nilotic ethnic groups that live in Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Northern Uganda, the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, western Kenya, and a portion of Tanzania.
The Joluo people consider themselves ‘Luo proper,’ and the Dholuo language is spoken by around 4.2 million Luo people in Kenya and Tanzania.
aswell said for such languages with dialects, varieties and spelling standards, Google Translate “will tend to output the most common variety found online, but will also mix between varieties.”
“The models will certainly make some silly mistakes in translation, but each one of them has gone through testing and evaluation with native speakers. They are all ‘generally useful and right most of the time’, and community members have emphasized that they are useful!” the engineer wrote on X.
The latest update brings to 243 the number of languages Translate currently supports as Google works towards building AI models that will support the 1,000 world’s most spoken languages.
