Google"s Translate service is one of the most popular automated translation services out there, and almost anyone is likely to have used it at some point. While most of the common languages around the world are already supported, some are still missing, and so Google has announced that, for the first time in four years, it"s expanding the capabilities of Google Translate by adding new languages to the service. With today"s additions, Google Translate now supports 108 languages in total.
The five new languages being added are Kinywarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen, and Uyghur, and they"re spoken by over 75 million people around the world. The languages are supported for both text and website translations, and - in the case of Kinyarwanda, Tatar, and Uyghur - the service also supports virtual keyboard input, so you can access the translations even if you have a keyboard in another language. Spoken translations aren"t supported, which isn"t unexpected.
Google isn"t taking full credit for the addition of these languages, though. The company says this was possible thanks to the contributions of the Google Translate Community, and it"s encouraging users to participate if they"d like to help improve the translations.
While this is the first time in a while that Google is adding completely new languages to the service, it"s been making plenty of improvements to Translate over the years. Back in July, it added support for camera translations in more languages, and further back, in 2018, languages with gendered words started supporting translation for both genders at the same time.