[HN Gopher] 110 new languages are coming to Google Translate
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110 new languages are coming to Google Translate
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-06-27 08:44 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| anon1094 wrote:
| The more languages the better. Google Translate has been very
| useful while abroad.
| mainecoder wrote:
| Yeah it's good. At least some of the languages( 3 in
| particular) will see the light of day and would be studied by
| linguist after the languages die in the next few years all
| three of them use the latin alphabet by the way since only had
| an oral tradition thus the people who are going to be actually
| using them are people who can read and write English, most of
| the speakers are illiterate and some speak the dominant
| language of the country they reside in and from those only a
| few will use this. Languages are Dying at an accelerating pace
| as the lands are good for mining are being exploited, climate
| change is putting an increasing strain on their ways of life
| and making interactions to outsiders a necessity.
| dbbk wrote:
| And yet it's still massively behind DeepL on the languages that
| they support. Why is it still so bad at the top languages like
| Spanish?
| seanhunter wrote:
| I understand the impetus behind keeping dying minority
| languages alive but it just makes no sense to devote even a
| second to implementing Manx[1] for example if you're not
| excellent at Spanish which is the second language in the world
| after Mandarin in terms of total population of speakers[2].
|
| [1] one of the languages they just added, which is a language
| where the last native speaker died in 1974 and there are
| currently less than 2000 speakers in total all of whom use it
| as a second language after English.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_language
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...
| nxrabl wrote:
| I don't think that follows. Most users of a translation app
| don't have any ability to judge the quality of the
| translations it produces, so the only distinguishing feature
| is ubiquity - if every language you can think of is in Google
| Translate, you might never go looking for other apps.
|
| Plus if you want to keep the best linguists employed, you
| have to give them fun things to do. Hard to write papers
| making Spanish translations a fraction of a percent better.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Why is it still so bad at the top languages like Spanish?
|
| Which Spanish? I thought South America, North America, and
| Europe Spanish all have their own peculiarities.
| debugnik wrote:
| Just Spanish translation to/from English in general, really.
| In my experience, the problem is not regional nuance, but how
| it simply falls way too often for false friends or overly
| literal wordings that miss the original meaning.
| Flimm wrote:
| I never expected some of these languages to get added to Google
| Translate. I'm delighted!
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Hopefully quality of translations will improve, they are behind
| deepl and ChatGPT.
| jinpa_zangpo wrote:
| Disappointed that Tibetan is still not available. It's not clear
| how the decision of what languages to add was made.
| junar wrote:
| Tibetan is part of the languages listed. Perhaps it is not
| released to everyone yet: the link below says "Over the next
| few days, you will see new languages available..."
|
| https://support.google.com/translate/answer/15139004
| Yawrehto wrote:
| Here's the full list:
| https://support.google.com/translate/answer/15139004.
|
| Still no Ladino, for the however-many-people (one?) were hoping
| that they'd add it. (Ladino, for those wondering, is a Jewish
| language, kind of like how Yiddish is a hybrid of German and
| Hebrew but with Spanish instead. The challenge would be that it's
| sometimes written in the Latin alphabet and sometimes in the
| Hebrew alphabet, but maybe more people would want to start
| learning it if they knew it existed.)
| ratg13 wrote:
| You'll probably have to wait a few years for genocide languages
| to become en vogue.
| kanbara wrote:
| if you mean languages of genociders than you're 100% wrong
| and that's disgusting. if you mean language of oppressed
| people who were genocided, well lots of those languages
| already exist in translate
| gumby wrote:
| > The challenge would be that it's sometimes written in the
| Latin alphabet and sometimes in the Hebrew alphabet, but maybe
| more people would want to start learning it if they knew it
| existed.)
|
| This is true of Yiddish too, and it has probably a couple of
| million speakers. Wikipedia claims about 50K speakers of
| Ladino, about 25X the number of Manx speakers (I mention Manx
| as it's included in Google's new list)
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| How will this increase ad revenue?
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(page generated 2024-06-27 23:02 UTC)