9 New Languages in Google Translate

Google Translate supports 9 new languages: Hausa (Nigeria, 35 million speakers), Igbo (Nigeria, 25 million speakers), Yoruba (Nigeria, 28 million speakers), Somali (Somalia, 17 million speakers), Zulu (South Africa, 10 million speakers), Mongolian (Mongolia, China, 6 million speakers), Nepali (Nepal, India, Bhutan 17 million speakers), Punjabi (India, Pakistan, 100 million speakers), Maori (New Zealand, 160,000 speakers). Google Translate now supports 80 languages and that's impressive.

According to Ethnologue, there are 80 languages with more than 10 million native speakers, 200 languages with at least 3 million speakers and 1,300 languages with at least 100,000 speakers. Google Translate supports all the languages with more than 100 million native speakers, 13 of the 16 languages that have between 50 and 100 million speakers, 4 of the 13 languages that have between 30 and 50 million speakers and 15 of the 47 languages that have between 10 and 30 million speakers.

Google Community Translation

You might remember "Google in Your Language", the Google feature that allowed you to translate Google services. It was a great way to help Google support new languages, but you could also use it to find new Google features.

It looks like the translation console will be back. There's a Google Community Translation page that links to a Chrome extension which is not available.

I searched for the extension ID and found a Chrome log with information about the extension: "Tool for providing translations and corrections for Google products". The name of the extension is "Google in Your Language".

{ Thanks, Florian K. }

New Google Translate Interface

Google Translate has a new compact interface that combines the drop-downs that allow you to select the language pairs with the tabs that show the last 3 languages you've selected.

Here's the old interface:

Usually Google does a good job at detecting the language of the original text, so it's a good idea to click "Detect language", unless your text is very short.

{ Thanks, Zachary. }

Align Parallel Texts and Help Improve Google Translate

When you select one the following language pairs in Google Translate: French <-> English or German <-> English, you might see a message at the bottom of the page: "Please help Google Translate improve quality for your language here". The link sends you to a page like this one (French -> English) or this one (German -> English).

It's an interesting way to help Google Translate become more accurate. Here's what you need to do: "In the translated sentence, select the words which mean the highlighted word in the original sentence."

It's likely that all the texts from this experiment are used to train Google Translate and they include professional translations. This might help Google Translate improve the word-level alignment of Google's parallel corpora.

For the English to German pair, you can change the task to "Select all good translations of the following term":