Whether you're teaching yourself a new language or trying to make a new friend,
Google Translate can be a powerful tool for crossing language barriers. Today, we're adding 10 languages to Translate, including four new Asian languages, bringing our total number of supported languages to 90.
In India and Southeast Asia, we are adding Malayalam, Myanmar, Sinhala, and Sundanese:
- Malayalam (മലയാളം), with 38 million native speakers, is one of India’s 6 classical languages. It’s also been one of the most-requested languages by our users, so we are especially excited to add Malayalam support!
- Myanmar (Burmese, မြန်မာစာ), spoken by 33 million native speakers, has been in the works for a long time. It's a challenging language for automatic translation, from both a language structure and a font encoding perspective. This is why we encourage the use of open standard fonts and therefore only output Myanmar translations in Unicode.
- Sinhala (සිංහල) is one of Sri Lanka’s official languages and natively spoken by 16 million people. In September the Google Translate Community in Sri Lanka organized Sinhala Translate Week. Since then, participants have contributed tens of thousands of translations to our system.
- Sundanese (Basa Sunda) is spoken by 39 million people living on the island of Java in Indonesia. While Sundanese does have its own script, it is today commonly written using the Latin alphabet.
In addition to these languages, we are adding several African languages, including Chichewa, Malagasy, and Sesotho; and Kazakh, Tajik, and Uzbek from Central Asia.
We’re just getting started with these new languages and have a long way to go. If it weren't for the active participation of the
Translate Community, we wouldn't be able to launch some of these languages today. While our translation system learns from translated data found on the web, sometimes we need support from humans to improve our algorithms. We're grateful for all the support we're getting and hope that together with our community, we can continue improving translation quality for the languages we support today and add even more languages in the future.
You can help us by suggesting your corrections using the "Improve this translation" functionality on Translate and contributing to
Translate Community.
Posted by Svetlana Kelman, Program Manager, Google Translate
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