Google – The largest internet search engine company, yesterday (June 22, 2011), announced that it would expand its translation services to include five more Indian languages. These languages include – Tamil, Telgu, Gujarati, Bengali and Kannada.
According to Google, adding these languages would increase its reach to about more than half a million people. According to Ashish Venugopal, research scientist at Google, “Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.”
In a Google Blog, he wrote – “In India and Bangladesh alone, more than 500 million people speak these five languages. Since 2009, we’ve launched a total of 11 alpha languages, bringing the current number of languages supported by Google Translate to 63.”
According to Google, these newly included languages are much less frequent than other more mature languages like Chinese or Spanish. It was also difficult to translate some of the words in these languages.
“Despite these challenges, we release alpha languages when we believe that they help people better access the multilingual web. If you notice incorrect or missing translations for any of our languages, please correct us; we enjoy learning from our mistakes and your feedback helps us graduate new languages from alpha status” said the research scientist at Google.
He further said that “Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we have enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards”. He hoped that including such languages to Google would make people to better understand these Indian languages. It would also encourage the creation of several digital text in these languages and will in turn help these languages to be alive in future too.