Sicilian is also among the 110 new languages implemented in the last few hours by Google Translate. The Mountain View giant announced that thanks to artificial intelligence, its translator was able to implement the program with these grafts. As mentioned, there is also space for some regional languages and dialects of the country, such as Venetian, Friulian, Sicilian, Lombard and Ligurian. The result is not always perfect, as far as Sicilian is concerned, which is common with other languages, but the result is still remarkable.
This is the largest expansion ever, considering that Big G, in 2022, had introduced 24 new languages, using Zero-Shot machine translation, in which a machine learning model learns to translate another language without ever seeing an example. Now the further development – decidedly more massive than the previous one – was made possible thanks to Palm 2, Google’s large language model.
From Cantonese to Qʼeqchiʼ, the 110 new languages now on Google Translate represent more than 614 million speakers, opening up the possibility of translation to approximately 8% of the world’s population. Some are languages with over 100 million speakers, others are spoken by small communities of indigenous people, and some have almost no native speakers but active revitalization efforts.
