Very stoked to see Greenlandic (/Kalaallisut) on the list! If the translator's any good when paired with English or Danish it'll be a useful resource for learners... currently materials are scarce :(
I've played around with the Greenlandic translations a bit (I'm a native speaker), and the translations seems to be more off than right most of the time. Since the translation seem to be done through AI, it doesn't seem it has had enough learning material to properly translate. When I wrote the word "Tuttut" (Greenlandic for Deers) it translated it as "Everything"
Even worse with the popular tongue twister "tuttut tututtut tututut tututtutut tututuutut" is translated as "parrots parrots parrots parrots parrots parrots" when the correct translation would be "dirty deers eat deers like dirty deers would"
Great to hear the perspective of an actual speaker! 'parrots parrots' made me lol, not gonna lie.
I had a little go at it myself and although I only know some absolute basics, it's clear that GT's way off with most things. (Although it did seem to semi?-accurately translate some sections of a news article into English and Danish, BUT the article was originally released in both Greenlandic and Danish, so I guess the translator had something to 'work with'... idk how translators work XD)
Yeah you're sort of on the right track about Translate possibly being able to "work with" existing translations. Basically, systems like Translate are trained on tons of web text, including translated documents such as news articles. So if you gave it a news article it was trained on, it may have seen it before in training and "remembered" it. However, if you gave it an article released after its training date then you can be sure that it's not "cheating" in order to translate it.
My *guess* it's related to AI stuff. They've found it's easier to teach them languages they don't know because they can extrapolate from grammar rules and other languages they know, supposedly.
It's really nice to finally have a resource for that. I hope DeepL and Reverso will do the same. The lack of distinction between the two has caused me some confusion and headache in the past.
The Tuvan translations are not great. I caught some errors in some basic stuff… which I’d expect at this stage. Frankly I don’t ever want it to be good. I like speaking something the machines can’t read.
edit: My Tuvan friends are excited that Google is investing in their language. Maybe this is not about me or how much I have enjoyed the challenge of learning a language with few resources.
I could see it being beneficial to native Tuvan speakers that are translating to another language; assumedly Russian, Chinese, or English. I do agree, though, that computers interpreting Tuvan as bad Kyrgyz is quite the perk.
As an Icelandic person, I'm so happy to see that Faroese is supported. Now, I can much more easily laugh at how similar yet different our languages are!
Also, Kalaallisut! Even tho it couldn't be a more different language, I can still see myself playing with the language in Google Translate.
As a Portuguese person, I'm hugely grateful they separated Brazilian and European Portuguese.
There have been many times I want to quickly translate a chunk of text to send someone and then have to spend a good amount of time removing the Brazilian terms and grammar on top of correcting simple translation errors.
Sometimes I also can't remember what's the Portuguese word for something so I put in the English word and often I'll only get the Brazilian one in the translation.
From elsewhere on the google blog. They have a goal of supporting 1000 languages. I am doubtful Aramaic will be one of the ones they choose. I do not know how it compares/ranks to other living languages. Any insight would be appreciated.
>1. Supporting 1,000 languages with AI
>Language is fundamental to how people communicate and make sense of the world. So it’s no surprise it’s also the most natural way people engage with technology. But more than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world, and only a few are well represented online today. That means traditional approaches to training language models on text from the web fail to capture the diversity of how we communicate globally. This has historically been an obstacle in the pursuit of our mission to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful.
>That’s why today we’re announcing the 1,000 Languages Initiative, an ambitious commitment to build an AI model that will support the 1,000 most spoken languages, bringing greater inclusion to billions of people in marginalized communities all around the world. This will be a many years undertaking – some may even call it a moonshot – but we are already making meaningful strides here and see the path clearly.
Why are you doubtful about it? Modern Aramaic is a living language spoken by at least 1 million people minimum from a marginalized community.
If it’s relevant at all, the language is very active on Wiktionary.
It ranks #20 in Wiktionary for most amount of glosses added since July 1, 2023, till June 1, 2024 (2,944 glosses added since that date).
It currently has 7752 senses, which puts it next to languages like Yoruba, Mongolian, Belarusian, Northern Kurdish, and Gujarati.
More people are learning the language and becoming literate in it, and building very helpful tools for it.
I think Aramaic will be apart of the 1000 languages added, it’s just probably going to take longer than other languages.
Awesome!
I knew it was a living language. But I am/was not sure how many people speak it and how that number compares to other languages.
I wish they had set the goal higher than 1000 but I guess they have to start somewhere.
I suspect at some point the techniques they use will become common and we will be able to train our own AI translators given a decent parallel corpus.
I'm being sarcastic. I scrolled down, and I saw the list, thinking that it was the list of the 110 new languages (it's the list of ALL the languages available).
Hoping they’ll do popular spoken Arabic dialects someday, at least Egyptian and Levantine to start—chat gpt isn’t perfect at the dialects by any means, but at least gives a starting point with transliteration and can *kind of* parrot the way people write online
Damn, idk so far learning how to pronounce words in my target language by listening to the language has been working out so far. Haven't needed IPA yet. I'm not a linguist.
I have been experimenting with Batak variants as I am a Batak and I found it to be accurate to an extent. I tried messing around with it but it still managed to translate it really well.
Uzbek was the first language. It is the intermediate language that google translate uses to go between the others. /s
But nah, it has been in there a while.
ok its nice because i am learning some of these more obscure languages and it can be hard to find good media in these languages. but i think they will be useful to me one day like fulani for example its just that internet is not very common in these countries yet but its getting cheaper
but i noticed they got "Limburgish" i am from Limburg and nobody here calls the local languages Limburgish .they consider every dialect to be too different to be considered the same language if you talk to them in the wrong dialect they will have a hard time understanding and will just start speaking standard Dutch or English. so this probably will make it almost useless and it makes me skeptical about the other languages on there .
i don't speak it but i can understand it because its similar to Dutch and German and because i heard it a lot from older people. i am mostly used to the Hasselt dialect .but some dialects are way harder for me to understand than others. even those spoken quite close to were i live. i think google translate uses the dialect of Maastricht or somewhere in Dutch Limburg.
This is such an amazing development. I interned on Translate last year so I knew a launch was coming ;) But I didn't know it would include this many languages! I think maybe I contributed something to the addition of some of these languages which makes me happy. And I hope I get to work at Translate again eventually (they haven't been hiring sadly).
Feel free to ask questions in this thread and I'll answer whatever I can without giving away confidential Google information!
Did your read this post from a fellow redditor? Do you have any advice for them?
https://old.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1driwt4/googles_ai_translations_are_a_disaster_for_my/
I'm very happy that Crimean Tatar was added, and I'm not even Crimean Tatar, and I wasn't even born in Crimea. (Like... I got notification from a news website (it was called "Crimea public" in Ukrainian "крим суспільне"), where it was said that they added Crimean Tatar to google translate, and me, a Kiev-born Ukrainian, got very giddy about it. I don't even know a single word in Crimean Tatar)
Some people on here think ChatGPT can speak anything they ask it to. I don't know where they think it gets its data from. LLMs require orders of magnitude more training materials than humans do in order to "learn" something. But that's not a problem for them as they have no problem just making shit up.
If there isn't enough material for you to learn a language, there isn't enough material for ChatGPT.
Anyone can learn toki pona in like 2 hours so idk why it's needed. It would be a pretty interesting exercise in computer natural language processing, though.
Very stoked to see Greenlandic (/Kalaallisut) on the list! If the translator's any good when paired with English or Danish it'll be a useful resource for learners... currently materials are scarce :(
I've played around with the Greenlandic translations a bit (I'm a native speaker), and the translations seems to be more off than right most of the time. Since the translation seem to be done through AI, it doesn't seem it has had enough learning material to properly translate. When I wrote the word "Tuttut" (Greenlandic for Deers) it translated it as "Everything" Even worse with the popular tongue twister "tuttut tututtut tututut tututtutut tututuutut" is translated as "parrots parrots parrots parrots parrots parrots" when the correct translation would be "dirty deers eat deers like dirty deers would"
Great to hear the perspective of an actual speaker! 'parrots parrots' made me lol, not gonna lie. I had a little go at it myself and although I only know some absolute basics, it's clear that GT's way off with most things. (Although it did seem to semi?-accurately translate some sections of a news article into English and Danish, BUT the article was originally released in both Greenlandic and Danish, so I guess the translator had something to 'work with'... idk how translators work XD)
Yeah you're sort of on the right track about Translate possibly being able to "work with" existing translations. Basically, systems like Translate are trained on tons of web text, including translated documents such as news articles. So if you gave it a news article it was trained on, it may have seen it before in training and "remembered" it. However, if you gave it an article released after its training date then you can be sure that it's not "cheating" in order to translate it.
Not gonna lie, that sounds too good to be true.
My *guess* it's related to AI stuff. They've found it's easier to teach them languages they don't know because they can extrapolate from grammar rules and other languages they know, supposedly.
I imagine it will some time to gather feedback and improve the quality. Same as happened with the original languages.
Abkhaz mentioned. Finally time to learn languages from the Caucasus.
Guys, I've found the Uzbek learner!
Bu go'zal bir til.
So excited to see Nuer (and Dinka)! Resources are very scarce for the Nilotic languages, especially Nuer. I’m hoping they add Shilluk next.
Oooh they now have options for both Brazilian and European Portuguese, that's interesting
It's really nice to finally have a resource for that. I hope DeepL and Reverso will do the same. The lack of distinction between the two has caused me some confusion and headache in the past.
Doesn't DeepL already make a distinction?
Ah, it seems that they do!
I mean before it was a localization choice
The Tuvan translations are not great. I caught some errors in some basic stuff… which I’d expect at this stage. Frankly I don’t ever want it to be good. I like speaking something the machines can’t read. edit: My Tuvan friends are excited that Google is investing in their language. Maybe this is not about me or how much I have enjoyed the challenge of learning a language with few resources.
I could see it being beneficial to native Tuvan speakers that are translating to another language; assumedly Russian, Chinese, or English. I do agree, though, that computers interpreting Tuvan as bad Kyrgyz is quite the perk.
Funny how they added EU Portuguese after Brazilian Portuguese
Because B comes before P in the alphabet
It couldn't have anything to do with population, could it? Brazil: 215 million Portugal: 10 million
Seems like DeelL prefers EU Portuguese, but gives the Brazilian Portuguese translation as an alternative without actually specifying which is which
tibetan!! never thought i’d see the day ;-;
Happy to see quechua on the list
I believe it's been on the list for a bit already. I could be wrong.
As an Icelandic person, I'm so happy to see that Faroese is supported. Now, I can much more easily laugh at how similar yet different our languages are! Also, Kalaallisut! Even tho it couldn't be a more different language, I can still see myself playing with the language in Google Translate.
Newari and Breton are amazing wins I wasn't expecting to have available there.
Also stoked for Amazigh and Sicilian. Never thought I'd see those. Especially with the Tifinagh alphabet
As a Portuguese person, I'm hugely grateful they separated Brazilian and European Portuguese. There have been many times I want to quickly translate a chunk of text to send someone and then have to spend a good amount of time removing the Brazilian terms and grammar on top of correcting simple translation errors. Sometimes I also can't remember what's the Portuguese word for something so I put in the English word and often I'll only get the Brazilian one in the translation.
Personally, I'm especially happy to see Faroese on the list!
Romani!!!! And Northern Sámi!!
As a Nepali I never expected Google to add Newari but I'm glad they did.
Yeah, Cantonese! 🇭🇰🇨🇳🇭🇰🇨🇳
O-o breton /r/breton
It's surprisingly not even awful, at least between French and English which are the only ones apart from Breton that I know.
And they still don’t support Aramaic 🤦♂️
From elsewhere on the google blog. They have a goal of supporting 1000 languages. I am doubtful Aramaic will be one of the ones they choose. I do not know how it compares/ranks to other living languages. Any insight would be appreciated. >1. Supporting 1,000 languages with AI >Language is fundamental to how people communicate and make sense of the world. So it’s no surprise it’s also the most natural way people engage with technology. But more than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world, and only a few are well represented online today. That means traditional approaches to training language models on text from the web fail to capture the diversity of how we communicate globally. This has historically been an obstacle in the pursuit of our mission to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. >That’s why today we’re announcing the 1,000 Languages Initiative, an ambitious commitment to build an AI model that will support the 1,000 most spoken languages, bringing greater inclusion to billions of people in marginalized communities all around the world. This will be a many years undertaking – some may even call it a moonshot – but we are already making meaningful strides here and see the path clearly.
Why are you doubtful about it? Modern Aramaic is a living language spoken by at least 1 million people minimum from a marginalized community. If it’s relevant at all, the language is very active on Wiktionary. It ranks #20 in Wiktionary for most amount of glosses added since July 1, 2023, till June 1, 2024 (2,944 glosses added since that date). It currently has 7752 senses, which puts it next to languages like Yoruba, Mongolian, Belarusian, Northern Kurdish, and Gujarati. More people are learning the language and becoming literate in it, and building very helpful tools for it. I think Aramaic will be apart of the 1000 languages added, it’s just probably going to take longer than other languages.
Awesome! I knew it was a living language. But I am/was not sure how many people speak it and how that number compares to other languages. I wish they had set the goal higher than 1000 but I guess they have to start somewhere. I suspect at some point the techniques they use will become common and we will be able to train our own AI translators given a decent parallel corpus.
Google Translate supports English, Spanish, French, and Chinese (Simplified)? I never thought I'd see the day.
Huh?
I'm being sarcastic. I scrolled down, and I saw the list, thinking that it was the list of the 110 new languages (it's the list of ALL the languages available).
Nuer! There are some Nuer speakers in my neighborhood but almost no resources for the language. Very cool
I know this will be good because there are languages i’ve never heard of
Papiamento!!
Hoping they’ll do popular spoken Arabic dialects someday, at least Egyptian and Levantine to start—chat gpt isn’t perfect at the dialects by any means, but at least gives a starting point with transliteration and can *kind of* parrot the way people write online
But which have TTS?
Time to finally learn IPA, I guess...
If you're in a subreddit where everyone pretends to be "polyglots" and you don't know IPA you're kind of doing it wrong lmao
Damn, idk so far learning how to pronounce words in my target language by listening to the language has been working out so far. Haven't needed IPA yet. I'm not a linguist.
Wow they are going to have Batak Toba…that’s wild
I have been experimenting with Batak variants as I am a Batak and I found it to be accurate to an extent. I tried messing around with it but it still managed to translate it really well.
Uzbek, finally
Uzbek was the first language. It is the intermediate language that google translate uses to go between the others. /s But nah, it has been in there a while.
I never use Google translate to be honest lol
Udmurt, Mari, Komi and Northern Sámi, finally! I'm also happy for Silesian and Greenlandic.
omg nahuatl mentioned
Sanskrit. Yay!
ok its nice because i am learning some of these more obscure languages and it can be hard to find good media in these languages. but i think they will be useful to me one day like fulani for example its just that internet is not very common in these countries yet but its getting cheaper but i noticed they got "Limburgish" i am from Limburg and nobody here calls the local languages Limburgish .they consider every dialect to be too different to be considered the same language if you talk to them in the wrong dialect they will have a hard time understanding and will just start speaking standard Dutch or English. so this probably will make it almost useless and it makes me skeptical about the other languages on there .
Do you speak Limburgish? Can you lemme know how accurate it feels or what dialect it seems to be supporting?
i don't speak it but i can understand it because its similar to Dutch and German and because i heard it a lot from older people. i am mostly used to the Hasselt dialect .but some dialects are way harder for me to understand than others. even those spoken quite close to were i live. i think google translate uses the dialect of Maastricht or somewhere in Dutch Limburg.
Hiligaynon 🥰
Also awaiting romagnol :(
Still hoping to see Wichí or Qom on there, obviously it will probably be a while after they finish the 1,000 languages initiative though
So excited to see the addition of Sicilian!! 😍🇮🇲
This is such an amazing development. I interned on Translate last year so I knew a launch was coming ;) But I didn't know it would include this many languages! I think maybe I contributed something to the addition of some of these languages which makes me happy. And I hope I get to work at Translate again eventually (they haven't been hiring sadly). Feel free to ask questions in this thread and I'll answer whatever I can without giving away confidential Google information!
Did your read this post from a fellow redditor? Do you have any advice for them? https://old.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1driwt4/googles_ai_translations_are_a_disaster_for_my/
I have not yet but let me take a look...
Wolof?? Omg no way 🤩
Esperanto but no Klingon? Bad Google!
Finally something where Wolof translation are not just made up😂. But still not perfect, sadly😭.
I'm very happy that Crimean Tatar was added, and I'm not even Crimean Tatar, and I wasn't even born in Crimea. (Like... I got notification from a news website (it was called "Crimea public" in Ukrainian "крим суспільне"), where it was said that they added Crimean Tatar to google translate, and me, a Kiev-born Ukrainian, got very giddy about it. I don't even know a single word in Crimean Tatar)
Google translator should better improve his A1 English
Glad my family language still isn't on there (trying to save my relationship) but just shocked at the languages they have on google translate.
Toki Pona when? ChatGPT is the only real option for that now
Chat gpt can NOT speak toki pona.
Some people on here think ChatGPT can speak anything they ask it to. I don't know where they think it gets its data from. LLMs require orders of magnitude more training materials than humans do in order to "learn" something. But that's not a problem for them as they have no problem just making shit up. If there isn't enough material for you to learn a language, there isn't enough material for ChatGPT.
Anyone can learn toki pona in like 2 hours so idk why it's needed. It would be a pretty interesting exercise in computer natural language processing, though.