Kurdish, Corsican, Frisian, Scottish Gaelic now available on Google's online translator tool

Google Translate breaks 100-language barrier

18.02.201610.30h

Translation of "good morning" into Frisian.

Google added this week 13 new languages -some of them minoritised ones- to its automatic online translator. The group includes Corsican, Frisian, Hawaiian, Kurdish and Scottish Gaelic. Having added those, more than 100 languages are now available in Google's translation machine.

Amharic (Ethiopia), Kirghiz, Luxembourgish, Samoan, Shona (Zimbabwe), Sindhi (Pakistan), Pashto (Afghanistan and Pakistan) and Xhosa (South Africa) are the other languages included this week.

According to Google Translate's official blog, "beyond the basic criteria that it must be a written language, we also need a significant amount of translations in the new language to be available on the web." It is thanks to this, the Californian company says, that "machines can "learn" the language " by "identifying statistical patterns at enormous scale […] as we scan the Web for billions of already translated texts."

Availability, or not, of preexisting translations helps explain why both languages having many speakers -such as Kurdish, more than 30 million- or few of them -Corsican, with 200,000- are included in one single expansion.

Other minoritised languages added before

Minoritised languages having been added this week are not the first ones to appear on Google Translate. Basque, Galician, Catalan, Welsh and Maori, just to mention a few, had previously made available in the tool.