For this growth, the company is making use of their LLM, which is known as PaLM 2.
Despite the fact that Google Translate is not even close to being perfect, it is nevertheless a useful tool for acquiring information or carrying on a conversation. The application of artificial intelligence by Google has resulted in the addition of 110 new languages to the Translate service. These languages include Cantonese, Punjabi (Shahmukhi), and NKo. Google asserts that all of the new languages collectively constitute 614 million speakers, which is equivalent to almost eight percent of the total population of the world. almost one quarter of the languages originate from Africa.
Google acknowledges that its LLM, PaLM 2, serves as “a key piece to the puzzle, helping Translate more efficiently learn languages that are closely related to each other, including languages close to Hindi, like Awadhi and Marwadi, and French creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole.” According to Isaac Caswell, a Senior Software Engineer at Google Translate, “As technology continues to advance and as we continue to partner with expert linguists and native speakers, we will support even more language varieties and spelling conventions over the course of time.”
The most recent significant influx of languages into Google Translate occurred in May of 2022, and it was made possible by Zero-Shot Machine Translation. Even though it does not observe examples, Zero-Shot makes it possible for a model to acquire knowledge of a new language. The 1,000 Languages Initiative was unveiled by Google later that year. The purpose of this initiative is to develop artificial intelligence models that are capable of supporting the one thousand languages that are spoken the most often around the world.