Thanks to the collaboration with Cademia Sicilia, from today the famous search engine translates from and into Sicilian any phrase and term into all the languages of the world
From today Google also “speaks” Sicilian. Thanks to the collaboration with the Sicilian Cademiaon Google Translate it is now possible to translate from and into Sicilian all the languages supported by the service.
The announcement was made by Cademia Siciliana, an association founded in 2016 with a clear and precise objective “to take care of the Sicilian language, as other organizations already do for other languages”. «After a collaboration lasting more than a year between Cademia Siciliana and Google, which saw hours of work and the translation of thousands of sentences from English to Sicilian, we proudly announce that from today the translation from and to all languages supported by Google Translate to the Sicilian language is available!».
In fact, it is enough to go to the well-known translation service to find Sicilian among the new languages. By writing any word or phrase in Sicilian, the latter is translated into the chosen language (Italian, English and so on). In addition to the translation, clicking on “Dictionary” gives you the definition of the term and some commonly used examples.
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“When adding new languages to Translate,” Google explains, “there are many things to consider: from the variants we offer to the specific spellings we use. Languages have an immense amount of variation: regional varieties, dialects, different spelling standards. Our approach has been to prioritize the most commonly used varieties of each language.”
A useful tool that represents a further (and important) step towards the recognition of the Sicilian as lingua to preserve.
UNESCO has declared that Sicilian is among the languages that is at risk of disappearing. In fact, there is a tendency to homologate it to Italian and this leads to the loss of ancient terms, especially those with different etymologies (such as Greek, Arabic and Spanish) to get closer to the national language or even to become Anglicized.
This is precisely why Google has already launched initiatives in the past to “save the Sicilian“, as in 2021, when again in collaboration with the Cademia Siciliana, it launched the open source Woolaroo platform, accessible both from the Arts & Culture app (for iOS and Android) and directly from the web, a digital tool that facilitates learning automatic. Simply frame an object with your smartphone to have simultaneous translation together with vocal pronunciation, thanks to the vast database created in collaboration between the search engine and the association.
The diffusion of Sicilian in the digital sphere, thanks to the creation of modern tools is one of the objectives of Cademia Siciliana, which in fact creates programs for modern computer keyboards, and has also collaborated with Google in the creation of Gboard in Sicilian, that is, the Google keyboard implemented on all Android devices.
«We have had Sicilian added on YouTube as a subtitling language – explains the association -, and on Facebook as a post compilation language; we have created the official translation into Sicilian of the famous instant messaging app Telegram”.
