The languages are Kinyarwanda, Odia (Oriya), Tatar, Turkmen and Uyghur and brings Google’s total number of languages covered by Translate to 108.
In a blog post, Google blamed the scarcity of these languages online as the reason for their late arrival.
“Translate learns from existing translations, which are most often found on the web. Languages without a lot of web content have traditionally been challenging to translate,” said Isaac Caswell, Software Engineer, Google Translate.
Uyghur is the language of the Uyghurs people who reside in China. Given Google services are blocked by the Chinese government, you might not have much luck using Google Translate if you’re trying to talk to anyone who speaks the language, but perhaps we are being to cynical of Google’s achievement.
Translate works excellently via text input, voice input and even using machine learning to translate text from images and photos. As ever with Google, it’s a free app and one of the most useful the company has.
Henry is Tech Advisor’s Phones Editor, ensuring he and the team covers and reviews every smartphone worth knowing about for readers and viewers all over the world. He spends a lot of time moving between different handsets and shouting at WhatsApp to support multiple devices at once.
