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Google Translate adds Hawaiian, Samoan and 11 other languages

COURTESY GOOGLE

A screenshot showed the English-to-Hawaiian translation feature of Google Translate in action.

Hawaiian has now been included in Google Translate, along with a dozen other languages from Amharic to Xhosa, according to Google’s blog.

Since 2006, Google Translate has grown to include 103 “machine learning-based translations” encompassing 99 percent of the online population, according to the blog.

The new languages now allow another 120 million people to communicate via Translate using Amharic, Corsican, Frisian, Kyrgyz, Hawaiian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Luxembourgish, Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Shona, Sindhi, Pashto and Xhosa.

Google says it scans the Internet for “billions of already translated texts” and uses “machine learning to identify statistical patterns at enormous scale, so our machines can ‘learn’ the language. But, as already existing documents can’t cover the breadth of a language, we also rely on people like you in Translate Community to help improve current Google Translate languages and add new ones, like Frisian and Kyrgyz. So far, over 3 million people have contributed approximately 200 million translated words.”

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