Google Translate adds Assamese, Bhojpuri, Maithili, 5 more Indian languages 

As real-time translation apps break language barriers, Google is now adding 24 new languages to Google Translate, taking the number to 133 languages across the world. Of the new 24 additions, eight are native to India.

The eight new English languages to be added soon include:

• Assamese, used by about 25 million people in Northeast India
• Bhojpuri, used by about 50 million people in northern India, Nepal and Fiji
• Dogri, used by about 3 million people in northern India
• Konkani, used by about 2 million people in Central India
• Maithili, used by about 34 million people in northern India
• Meiteilon (Manipuri), used by about 2 million people in Northeast India
• Mizo, used by about 830,000 people in Northeast India
• Sanskrit, used by about 20,000 people in India

Using Google Translate:

Google Translate can be used from the web browser or a user can install the app from Google Play Store or Apple App Store. When using text translation, the user has to select the language he/she is typing in and the desired language they want the translation in. For instance, from Hindi to English. There is also a camera option that one can use to capture an image, scan text or fetch images for translation on the gallery. Plus there is a microphone option that can listen in real-time to give a translation. The last option is to transcribe and continuously translate speech. While the app uses mobile data or Wi-Fi to work, there is also an option to use it offline by downloading a language translation file. For instance, the file size of the Hindi language is 74.9MB on iPhone.

At the time of filing the article, none of the new additions was reflected on the Translate app or the browser. However, the same should be coming soon.

Real-time translation is a testament to how knowledge and computing come together to make people's lives better. More people are using Google Translate than ever before. There’s a long tail of languages that are underrepresented on the web today, and translating them is a hard technical problem. “That’s because translation models are usually trained with bilingual text — for example, the same phrase in both English and Spanish. However, there's not enough publicly available bilingual text for every language. So with advances in machine learning, we’ve developed a monolingual approach where the model learns to translate a new language without ever seeing a direct translation of it. By collaborating with native speakers and institutions, we found these translations were of sufficient quality to be useful, and we'll continue to improve them,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google & Alphabet.

Google also says over 300 million people speak these newly added languages — like Mizo, used by around 800,000 people in the far northeast of India, and Lingala, used by over 45 million people across Central Africa. As part of this update, indigenous languages of the Americas (Quechua, Guarani and Aymara) and an English dialect (Sierra Leonean Krio) have also been added to Translate for the first time.

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