No Nigerian language is included this time in a list that already has Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa.
Google Translate has added 24 new languages to its existing register, making it 133 the number of languages it can intepret using its algorithms.
The firm listed languages indigenous to Africa, India and the Americas spoken by 300 million people.
Some of the new African languages in the list are spoken Ghana, Togo, Sierra Leone, Mali, South Africa, Eritrea, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Namibia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
No Nigerian language was included this time. The translator already supports Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa.
The new list includes Assamese, used by about 25 million people in Northeast India, Aymara, spoken by about 2 million people in Bolivia, Chile and Peru Bambara, native to about 14 million people in Mali.
Google said the new languages are the first to use Zero-Shot Machine Translation, in which a machine learning model only sees monolingual text and learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example.
Google admitted that the technology is not perfect.
“This is also a technical milestone for Google Translate,” Isaac Caswell, a senior software engineer, Google Translate.
Here’s a full list of the new languages now available in Google Translate:
- Assamese, used by about 25 million people in Northeast India
- Aymara, used by about two million people in Bolivia, Chile and Peru
- Bambara, used by about 14 million people in Mali
- Bhojpuri, used by about 50 million people in northern India, Nepal and Fiji
- Dhivehi, used by about 300,000 people in the Maldives
- Dogri, used by about three million people in northern India
- Ewe, used by about seven million people in Ghana and Togo
- Guarani, used by about seven million people in Paraguay and Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil
- Ilocano, used by about 10 million people in northern Philippines
- Konkani, used by about two million people in Central India
- Krio, used by about four million people in Sierra Leone
- Kurdish (Sorani), used by about eight million people, mostly in Iraq
- Lingala, used by about 45 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo,
- Central African Republic, Angola and the Republic of South Sudan
- Luganda, used by about 20 million people in Uganda and Rwanda
- Maithili, used by about 34 million people in northern India
- Meiteilon (Manipuri), used by about two million people in Northeast India
- Mizo, used by about 830,000 people in Northeast India
- Oromo, used by about 37 million people in Ethiopia and Kenya
- Quechua, used by about 10 million people in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and surrounding countries
- Sanskrit, used by about 20,000 people in India
- Sepedi, used by about 14 million people in South Africa
- Tigrinya, used by about eight million people in Eritrea and Ethiopia
- Tsonga, used by about seven million people in Eswatini, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe
- Twi, used by about 11 million people in Ghana