Google Translate at 20 Years Old

Happy Birthday Google Translate! The ubiquitous service was born in April of 2006. Google itself only began operation eight years before that. I stumbled across it in 1999 when searching for sites to place links as part of a previous job. I'd never heard of it before. Alta Vista (remember them?) was the major search engine. Alta Vista had a translator too but it was not well known. Even before Google itself was big, it began devouring everyone else. They were just better at what they did. By 2006, I think most people were searching with Google. I had switched years earlier. It provided the best results of the various web crawlers that existed at the time. Sometime after 2006, I found myself regularly using Google Translate too.

Its impact has been enormous. It has made information, books, documents, websites, postings available worldwide in a way unheard of before. You no longer need to be a linguist to read them all. At first, the translation could be described as better than nothing. Over the years, Google has made many adjustments to improve the product. Its translations today are quite good.

Google has also extended the number of languages it translates. It is now up to 249. The last big expansion came in 2024 when they added 110 more languages. Those languages are Abkhaz, Acehnese, Acholi, Afar, Alur, Avar, Awadhi, Balinese, Baluchi, Baoulé, Bashkir, Batak Karo, Batak Simalungun, Batak Toba, Bemba, Betawi, Bikol, Breton, Buryat, Cantonese, Chamorro, Chechen, Chuukese, Chuvash, Crimean Tatar, Dari, Dinka, Dombe, Dyula, Dzongkha, Faroese, Fijian, Fon, Friulian, Fulani, Ga, Hakha Chin, Hiligaynon, Hunsrik, Iban, Jamaican Patois, Jingpo, Kalaallisut, Kanuri, Kapampangan, Khasi, Kiga, Kikongo, Kituba, Kokborok, Komi, Latgalian, Ligurian, Limburgish, Lombard, Luo, Madurese, Makassar, Malay (Jawi), Mam, Manx, Marshallese, Marwadi, Mauritian Creole, Meadow Mari, Minang, Nahuatl (Eastern Huasteca), Ndau, Ndebele (South), Nepalbhasa (Newari), NKo, Nuer, Occitan, Ossetian, Pangasinan, Papiamento, Portuguese (Portugal), Punjabi (Shahmukhi), Q'eqchi', Romani, Rundi, Sami (North), Sango, Santali, Seychellois Creole, Shan, Sicilian, Silesian, Susu, Swati, Tahitian, Tamazight, Tamazight (Tifinagh), Tetum, Tibetan, Tiv, Tok Pisin, Tongan, Tswana, Tulu, Tumbuka, Tuvan, Udmurt, Venda, Venetian, Waray, Wolof, Yakut, Yucatec Maya, and Zapotec.

I think I've sort of heard of about ten of them. The rest I have no idea where they are spoken. I have only had cause to translate from one of them. I once needed to translate some ancient Venetian text online. Google did a fine job of it despite the writing being very old. However, Google does not translate every language... yet. According to Google's own Gemini AI, it does not translate Aramaic, Quechua, Bhojpuri, Fula, Wolof, or Oromo. I have no doubt one day it will. It can translate text into emojis, and whatever that language is your kids speak so you can't understand them. Sorry, kids. Now your parents know. They now can help you pronounce those foreign languages into which you have translated your own. Google is developing audio translating that will enable you to carry on conversations with people who speak another language.

When Gutenberg invented printing with movable type, it did wonders to spread the learning contained in books to a much larger audience than previously possible. The common use of Latin served as something of a translator as some people in many lands spoke it. Then we began to see books printed in the native tongues of some of those lands making it available to larger numbers of people within a targeted area. Next, we began to see translators take some of those books and translate them into other languages (though probably not Awadhi or Zapotec). That is basically where we have been for the past 500 years.

Now, with automated translation, and Google is at the forefront of this, people can read books in many different languages, even very old books such as the Venetian text mentioned earlier. Doors once closed, have been opened. With Google now translating 249 languages, and even speech, the barriers to communication continue to come down. It's a new day of connection between peoples. Hopefully, the ability to better understand each other will draw us closer together, smooth out the differences, and convince us war is not the right way to communicate, even if governments still seem to believe it is.

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Google Translate at 20 Years Old

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Google Translate at 20 Years Old

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