Nairobi News

Global tech giant Google has added 24 new languages spoken by more than 300 million people to its Google Translate platform.

The firm listed languages indigenous to Africa, India and the Americas spoken by 300 million people.

Some of the new African languages in the list are spoken in Ghana, Togo, Sierra Leone, Mali, South Africa, Eritrea, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Namibia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

The new list includes Assamese, used by about 25 million people in Northeast India, Aymara, spoken by about 2 million people in Bolivia, Chile and Peru Bambara, native to about 14 million people in Mali.

Google said the new languages are the first to use Zero-Shot Machine Translation, in which a machine learning model only sees monolingual text and learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example.

“For years, Google Translate has helped break down language barriers and connect communities all over the world. This is also a technical milestone for Google Translate,” the US-based company said, while acknowledging that technology is not perfect.

Full list of 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.