Shillong, June 28: Using artificial intelligence (AI), Google has announced the addition of 110 new languages to Google Translate, including Cantonese, several African languages, and Meghalaya’s very own Khasi language.
These new languages represent more than 614 million speakers, opening up translations for around 8% of the world’s population, a Google company representative said.
“Some are major world languages with over 100 million speakers. Others are spoken by small communities of Indigenous people, and a few have almost no native speakers but active revitalization efforts,” the company said in a statement.
The inclusion of the Khasi language in Google Translate will greatly benefit national and international tourists visiting Meghalaya, helping to overcome the language barrier between locals and tourists. Although a majority of the state’s population speaks English, even if not fluently, the use of Google Translate will certainly aid in boosting the tourism economy.
According to Britannica Company – the longest-running in-print encyclopaedia in the English language, speakers of Khasi language number about 900,000, most of whom speak Khāsi; other languages of the group include Amwi (War), Synteng (Pnar), and Lyng-ngam.
Google Translate’s latest update is its largest expansion to date. The new languages include widely spoken ones and those with fewer speakers, encompassing Indigenous languages and those being revitalized. This expansion follows Google’s 2022 addition of 24 languages using Zero-Shot Machine Translation and the launch of the 1,000 Languages Initiative.
