Expanding the Limits of Understanding: More Translatable Languages

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Google Translate just added 110 new languages. These are the languages spoken by more than half a billion people. And some of them are major languages like Cantonese, and other ones are the endangered languages like Manx, which is the Celtic language from the Isle of Man. And then there are others in between, like Kalalissut, which is spoken in Greenland, and Latgallian in eastern Latvia. And about a quarter of these languages come from Africa.

And Grant, I just think it’s thrilling to see, number one, how many different languages there are in the world. And number two, it’s fascinating to see that this is even possible to do. I mean, 110 more languages than what’s already there. And a world of AI and large language models where they’re getting a lot of pushback for their mistakes, it’s easy to miss sight of stuff like this that is now possible because of so-called AI.

And Google has a long explanation on its blog about how and why this happened, but it really would not have been easily possible without these advancements we’ve seen over the last five to ten years.

Yeah, no, not at all.

Yeah, they look at these languages and they analyze the grammar and then they can present translations. I’m looking forward to it as somebody who deep dives the unusual dictionaries in Internet Archive in old languages like Breton, B-R-E-T-O-N, which is spoken in France. I love this. I love the idea that I can now do a screen grab, convert it to text, and translate and get an approximation of what it means. It’s amazing.

Well, we love all these little aspects that technology makes possible with language. We’d love to hear about the language tools that you use in your day-to-day life, in your work, in your schooling. What do you use to help you with the languages of the world?

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.