Languages Supported by Google Translate Increase
The article on eweek titled Google Translate Adds Support for More World Languages announces Google’s addition of nine languages to its service, making the total number 80 languages. These included several African languages spoken in Nigeria, Somalia and South Africa. There are motions in progress to add Mongolian, Nepali, Punjabi and Maori. The last was only made possible by New Zealanders, as the article explains:
“The Translate effort for Maori was made possible due to the “volunteer effort of passionate native speakers in New Zealand,” he [Arne Mauser, Google Translate software engineer] wrote. Users who want Google Translate to add other languages to the service can participate by “volunteering to help us gather and translate texts in your language,” he wrote. “We’re also constantly fine-tuning our translations. You can help with these efforts by clicking the translated text and editing it to be correct.”
The app itself is simple enough to use. You can now speak into an Android device and receive a translation or use the handwriting feature. You can also take a picture of text in another language and highlight the words you want to learn. The app is appealing to travelers especially now that it is possible to use language-translation on their phones even without an internet connection, by downloading offline language apps.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Phi Beta Iota: Farsi, Dari, and Pashto are not in the Google inventory. We believe they have been developed but are being withheld from public use.
