Google adds more languages to its AI-powered translator

After adding language support for almost one-third of the world's population by adding native languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish, Google is adding more languages to its Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT).

In a blog post, Google announced that it's adding support for three more languages - Hindi, Russian and Vietnamese.

Introduced last year, Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT), translates entire sentences with deep neural networks. Instead of translating the sentences piece by piece, Neural translation translates the sentence as a whole. It also adjusts the sentence using proper grammar. As per the company, "improved translations help the system figure out the broader context and the most relevant translation."

Moreover, the Neural Machine Translation system learns over time and improves, resulting in better and more natural translations the longer it works.

"Neural translation is a lot better than our previous technology, because we translate whole sentences at a time, instead of pieces of a sentence. This makes for translations that are usually more accurate and sound closer to the way people speak the language," said Barak Turovsky, product lead for Google Translate, in the blog post.

Google Translate serves over 500 million monthly users in need of 140 billion words per day. According to Google, the languages added in November last year covers more than 35 percent of all Google Translate queries. The latest addition to the supported languages list - Hindi, Russian and Vietnamese - is also fairly significant in terms of scale.

In the U.S. alone, 1,292,448 people speak Vietnamese; another 836,171 speak Russian; and 586,173 speak Hindi, Google says, citing U.S. census data. Google also said more languages will be added in weeks ahead, including Thai.

According to the report, Google’s switch to this AI-powered machine translation system is expected to complete this year.

The new translations have already been rolled out to the Google Translate platform, Google Search app, and in the Google Translate apps for iOS and Android.