蜜芽传媒

Google has added 24 new languages to its popular and well-used Google Translate platform. It brings to 133 the total number of language translations available.

Ten of the new languages are in Africa, and Google says more than 300m people speak these new African additions. They include Lingala used widely in central Africa; Bambara, which is used by about 14 million people in Mali; and Oromo which is used in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Overall Sanskrit is the most highly requested language and despite the archaic nature of the language there is a good reason for this, according to the Google tech designer, Isaac Caswell, who worked on these and the other under-served languages.

鈥淭here are not many native speakers of Sanskrit鈥� but people across the Indian sub-continent learn it in school and it has very important religious significance.鈥�

鈥淯p until now our translation models have only been able to learn from translated text and there was not enough online to support these [latest additional languages]. These new [translations] will make more mistakes than the earlier ones鈥� but our main job here in the research department is to improve the quality of translation and over such a short period of time there have been so many improvements made.鈥�

(Pic:Woman working on computer Credit: Getty Images)

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