'‘Kem chho’' to '‘kemon aacho’:' Google makes it easy

Now, translating different regional languages to Gujarati or vice versa is just a click away. Thanks to internet search engine giant Google’s move to include five more Indian languages — Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu — in its translation services, Gujaratis can now skip referring to the dictionary and switch to ‘Google Translate’.

With the move, Google has thus increased its reach to another 500 million people.

“Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu,” said Ashish Venugopal, research scientist at Google, in Washington.

IT experts in Ahmedabad feel the move will remove limitation of knowing a specific language.

“The move will specially help people in rural parts of these regions and more and more people will be able to use the service. The move also suggests that how small regions or regional languages are having an impact on services,” said former president of Gujarat Electronic and Software Industries Association (GESIA), Neerav Shah.

Google already supports translation services in Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Punjabi. With the new inclusion, Google now supports translations in nine Indian languages.

“In India and Bangladesh alone, more than 500 million people speak these five languages. Since 2009, we’ve launched a total of 11 alpha languages, bringing the current number of languages supported by Google Translate to 63,” Venugopal wrote in a Google Blog. Venugopal said one can expect translations for these new alpha languages to be less fluent and include many more untranslated words than some of the more mature languages like Spanish or Chinese, which have much more of the web content that powers its statistical machine translation approach.

“Despite these challenges, we release alpha languages when we believe that they help people better access the multilingual web. If you notice incorrect or missing translations for any of our languages, please correct us; we enjoy learning from our mistakes and your feedback helps us graduate new languages from alpha status,” the Google research scientist said.

“Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we have enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards,” he said. He hoped that the launch of these new alpha languages will help one better understand the Indic (Indo-Aryan languages) web and encourage the publication of new content in Indic languages, taking Google five alpha steps closer to a web without language barriers.