The Hawaiian language, once banned in the public schools and teetering on the edge of extinction two decades ago, is now being translated by Web giant Google.

The Internet services company announced Wednesday that Hawaiian and a dozen other languages have joined the ranks of those being translated by its online service Google Translate.

“Wow,” said Lanakila Mangauil, founder and director of the Hawaiian Cultural Center of Hamakua on Hawaii island. “It’s a testament to our movement and the reawakening of our people.”

Despite a disappointing initial review Wednesday, Marvin Puakea Nogelmeier, University of Hawaii at Manoa Hawaiian language professor, said he is impressed by Google’s willingness to embrace the language.

“I appreciate their awareness of Hawaiian as a living language,” he said. “Most of the languages they added are spoken by millions.”

Other languages added Wednesday were Amharic, Corsican, Frisian, Kyrgyz, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Luxembourgish, Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Shona, Sindhi, Pashto and Xhosa.

Google said the new languages allow an additional 120 million people to communicate with Google Translate, a service that was launched in 2006 and now translates a total of 103 languages spoken by 99 percent of the online population.

There are nearly 7,000 languages across the globe, according to the Linguistic Society of America, although a quarter of them have fewer than 1,000 remaining speakers

How does a language make the grade for Google Translate?

Google says it scans the Internet for “billions of already translated texts” and uses “machine learning to identify statistical patterns at enormous scale.”

The company also relies on Translate Community to help improve the roster of Google Translate languages and to add new ones. Individuals within the online forum have lobbied for Hawaiian, according to Google.

Mangauil said that including Hawaiian in Google Translate marks another milestone for a language that was close to extinction only a couple of decades ago, when perhaps only 1,000 people were fluent.

The revival of the language continues each year with a growing number of uses in everyday life, including as a recent option for users of Bank of Hawaii ATM machines and in courtroom proceedings, he said.

“I’m stoked. It’s awesome,” he said regarding Google Translate.

But there were no rave reviews Wednesday. Nogelmeier said that while the online service appeared to be useful in translating the easy stuff, the product was off when the language grew more complex.

For example, when the professor typed in the Hawaiian language, “I saw you yesterday,” the English translation was perfect. But when he typed in Hawaiian, “My neighbor saw you the day before yesterday,” the English translation was: “I saw my neighbor you yesterday and the day.”

“It’s getting the framework of the language but missing the context,” he said.

Google Translate performed even worse when it went from English to Hawaiian. Nogelmeier said it failed to recognize the correct Hawaiian form of the word for “you.”

Nogelmeier said that until the service improves, he would consider it a toy rather than a tool. He said it will cause “more static, but static can be a good thing if it leads to searching for the right tools” for language learning.

Google said translations will improve over time with the help of Translate Community. So far, more than 3 million people since 2006 have contributed about 200 million translated words that are helping to get words and phrases right, according to Google.

But Kerry Laiana Wong, UH-Manoa associate professor of Hawaiian language, said he believes such translation services work to undermine the Hawaiian language by causing people to rely on a translator rather than actually learning the full context of the language.

“My goal is to increase speakers, but translation works counter to that,” he said.

Wong, who writes the Saturday Hawaiian language column in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, said a lot of subtleties in language are lost in the sterile translation of a computer. Moreover, a translation into English imposes “an English worldview,” he said.

Translators may get into the neighborhood of understanding but they are never truly close to the original, Wong said.

“Getting close is just the half of it,” he said.