Since last year, the translation app Google Translate has mastered 131 languages plus both the traditional and the simplified version of written Chinese. Most recently, almost all of this language can be used offline, i.e. without transmitting the content to a server. Only 26 languages require connection to Google.
The prerequisite is that the user first downloads the corresponding translation package in the Google Translate app. At the beginning of 2023, 33 languages were added there. Frisian, Yiddish and Lëtzebuergesch (Luxembourgish) as well as Latin in other respects should be of particular interest for the German-speaking area. The software is available free of charge for both Android and iOS.
The other languages now available offline are Basque, Burmese, Cebuano, Chichewa, Corsican, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hmong, Igbo, Javanese, Khmer, Kinyarwanda, Kurdish, Lao, Madagascan, Maori, Oriya, Samoan, Scottish Gaelic, Sesotho, Shona , Sindhi, Sundanese, Tatar, Turkmen, Uyghur, Xhosa, Yoruba and Zulu.
A long way to the worldwide translation machine
With 133 languages, Google Translate reaches a majority of netizens in at least one language they speak, but that represents only a fraction of the languages spoken worldwide. While languages are dying out, there are still over 7,000. However, the precise demarcation between a language and a dialect is difficult and often (politically) feuded. Yiddish, North Frisian, Romani, Saterland, Sorbian and South Jutish are particularly threatened with extinction in Germany.
A challenge for the development of machine translation is that for many languages there are no comprehensive, clean text collections that are also available in other languages with the same content. Last year, Google introduced 24 languages for Google Translate for the first time, where the system was largely trained with text that was only available in a single language – so-called zero-resource translation. After all, these 24 languages are spoken by 300 million people, ranging from Bhojpuri (50 million speakers) and Lingala (45 million) to Sanskrit (20,000). However, Google has not yet complied with the request from the Faroe Islands to be included in Google Translate.
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