Google Translate will now support Dholuo, the language of the Luo tribe, following a major language support update by Google. The Alphabet-owned tech giant announced the addition of 110 new languages to the service, marking its biggest language expansion yet.
This update is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) through Google’s PaLM 2 large language model, which also drives the company’s AI chatbot, Bard. Other new languages included in this update are Awadhi, Cantonese, and Marwari.
Google senior software engineer Isaac Caswell highlighted that about a quarter of the new languages are African, describing it as their “latest expansion of African languages to date.”
The Luo people, comprising several Nilotic ethnic groups, are found across Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Northern Uganda, eastern DRC, western Kenya, and parts of Tanzania. The Joluo, considered the ‘Luo proper,’ speak the Dholuo language, which is used by approximately 4.2 million people in Kenya and Tanzania.
Caswell said for such languages with dialects, varieties and spelling standards, Google Translate “will tend to output the most common variety found online, but will also mix between varieties.”
“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!” the engineer wrote on X.
The latest update brings to 243 the number of languages Translate currently supports as Google works towards building AI models that will support the 1,000 world’s most spoken languages.
