Google Translate has expanded its language support to include Dholuo, the language of the Luo tribe, in its largest update yet for the online translation service.
Announced by Alphabet-owned tech giant Google, the update introduces 110 new languages to Google Translate, facilitated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Google’s PaLM 2 large language model, which also powers the company’s AI chatbot, Bard.
Senior software engineer Isaac Caswell highlighted that about a quarter of the newly added languages are African, marking Google’s most significant expansion of African language support to date.
The Luo people comprise several Nilotic ethnic groups spanning Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Northern Uganda, eastern DRC, western Kenya, and parts of Tanzania. Among them, the Joluo people, known as ‘Luo proper’, speak Dholuo, a language used by approximately 4.2 million Luo individuals in Kenya and Tanzania.
Regarding languages like Dholuo, which feature various dialects, variants, and spelling norms, Google Translate aims to deliver translations primarily based on the most prevalent usage found online, while also incorporating diverse variants.
“The models will certainly make some silly mistakes in translation, but each one of them has gone through testing and evaluation with native speakers. They are all ‘generally useful and right most of the time’, and community members have emphasized that they are useful!” Caswell explained on Twitter (X).
With this update, Google Translate now supports a total of 243 languages, part of Google’s ongoing initiative to develop AI models capable of accommodating the world’s 1,000 most spoken languages.
