Luganda speakers are about to enjoy the internet more than ever as the Google translate feature will start supporting the language on top of other 23 new languages. Goggle estimates that the language is spoken by over 20 million people in Uganda and Rwanda. This was announced at the recent annual developer conference, I/O 2022, where the search giant made a host of exciting new announcements for its products and services. The translation feature uses a new machine learning technique.
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Google Translate has added 24 new languages to its translation service, taking the number of languages it supports to a total of 133. Among these 24 newly-added languages apart from Luganda (Uganda and Rwanda), 8 are in use in Africa. The list includes Ewe (Ghana), Krio (Sierra Leone), Lingala (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Angola, and the Republic of South Sudan), Oromo (Kenya & Ethiopia), Sepedi (South Africa), Tigrinya (Eritrea and Ethiopia), Tsonga (Eswatini, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe) and Twi (Ghana).
Kampuni ya Google erangiridde nga Oluganda bweruli olumu ku nnimi 24 ezayungiddwa ku kibanja kino ku Ssemazinga Africa, nga kati zisobola okukyuusibwa n’okuvuunulwa okuva mu nnimi endala. Eyakuliddemu kaweefube ono, Isaac Caswell agamba kino bakikoze okugaziya empeereza yabwe. pic.twitter.com/I5MuzW3xgQ
— BBS TEREFAYINA (@bbstvug) May 12, 2022
The addition of these new languages including Luganda also presents a technical milestone for Google Translate since these are the first languages added using Zero-Shot Machine Translation. This means Google can directly translate between language pairs unseen in training, and translate from one language into another language without ever seeing an example. Google did say that the technology isn’t yet perfect.
This is a complete list of the new languages now available in Google Translate:
- Assamese: Used by about 25 million people in Northeast India
- Aymara: Used by about two million people in Bolivia, Chile and Peru
- Bambara: Used by about 14 million people in Mali
- Bhojpuri: Used by about 50 million people in northern India, Nepal and Fiji
- Dhivehi: Used by about 300,000 people in the Maldives
- Dogri: Used by about three million people in northern India
- Ewe: Used by about seven million people in Ghana and Togo
- Guarani: Used by about seven million people in Paraguay and Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil
- Ilocano: Used by about 10 million people in northern Philippines
- Konkani: Used by about two million people in Central India
- Krio: Used by about four million people in Sierra Leone
- Kurdish (Sorani): Used by about eight million people, mostly in Iraq
- Lingala: Used by about 45 million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Angola and the Republic of South Sudan
- Luganda: Used by about 20 million people in Uganda and Rwanda
- Maithili: Used by about 34 million people in northern India
- Meiteilon (Manipuri): Used by about two million people in Northeast India
- Mizo: Used by about 830,000 people in Northeast India
- Oromo: Used by about 37 million people in Ethiopia and Kenya
- Quechua: Used by about 10 million people in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and surrounding countries
- Sanskrit: Used by about 20,000 people in India
- Sepedi: Used by about 14 million people in South Africa
- Tigrinya: Used by about eight million people in Eritrea and Ethiopia
- Tsonga: Used by about seven million people in Eswatini, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe
- Twi: Used by about 11 million people in Ghana
