Google Translate has been around since 2006, and has since became the popular tool for translating things.
The free multilingual statistical and neural machine translation service is adding support for five new languages, bringing its total to 109 languages. The move marks the first addition of new languages to Google Translate in four years, the company said.
The languages include Kinyarwanda (Rwanda), Odia (India), Tata, Turkmen and, notably, Uyghur.
According to Google, the collective speaking population of the five languages combined is about 75 million people around the globe.
And as for its virtual keyboard, Translate adds supports for Kinyarwanda, Tatar and Uyghur.
It took Google quite some times to add these languages, because it had a hard time finding a sufficient amount of online text to train Translate's machine learning models. The five languages haven't been utilized often across the web, making them particularly difficult for its platform to study and decipher.
Google also met issue in finding enough human community members who can help it refine the models so that they’re at the level of more widely spoken languages.
Google started using neural machine translation engine since 2016.
Called the Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT), it translates "whole sentences at a time, rather than just piece by piece, and uses a broader context to help it figure out the most relevant translation, which it then rearranges and adjusts to be more like a human speaking with proper grammar."
According to the company's spokesperson in a blog post:
Originally only enabled for a few languages back in 2016, GNMT is used in all 109 languages in the Google Translate as of 2020, except for Kyrgyz, Latin, and the Belarusian, Maltese and Sundanese to other languages pairs.
The update is rolling out slowly to the 1% of Google Translate users, the company says, with a steady ramping up to the full Translate user base across Android and iOS in the coming days.
Of particular geopolitical significance is Google Translate’s support for the Uyghur language, which is spoken by 12 million people who predominantly live in the autonomous Xinjiang region in northwest China.
Over the last few years, the Chinese government has waged a campaign against the Turkic Muslim minority group living in the area, involving mass surveillance, work and travel restrictions, and detention in Communist Party “re-education camps” under the guise of national security, causing international alarm over potential human rights abuses.
It may be difficult for Uyghurs to use Google Translate since China both blocks Google services and has been targeting their population.
But nonetheless, the addition could help outsiders understand the community, whether it's for travel or research.