Just before Google Translate’s tenth birthday, the service has hit a major milestone.
After an update Wednesday that added 13 more languages to the machine-learning based translation tool, Google Translate now covers more than 100 languages—encompassing 99% of the online population.
The 13 new languages are Amharic, Corsican, Frisian, Kyrgyz, Hawaiian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Luxembourgish, Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Shona, Sindhi, Pashto, and Xhosa, Google Translate’s Sveta Kelman wrote in a post. The addition of these languages added 120 million potential users.
“No matter what language you speak, we hope today’s update makes it easier to communicate with millions of new friends and break language barriers one conversation at a time,” Kelman wrote.
Google Translate understands languages by analyzing troves of documents through machine learning, and supplementing that with human translation. More than 3 million volunteers have pitched in to translate phrases for the service to make its translations more natural.
