Google Translate now supports Dholuo

The Alphabet-owned tech giant announced that it is expanding the pool of languages Google Translate supports by rolling out 110 new languages to the service.

The new update uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and is driven by Google’s PaLM 2 large language model, which also powers the company’s AI chatbot, Bard.

Among the other new languages Google Translate will support are Awadhi, Cantonese and Marwari.

Google senior software engineer Isaac Caswell said that about a quarter of the languages are African. He called it their “latest expansion of African languages to date.”

The Luo comprise several Nilotic ethnic groups found across Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Northern Uganda, eastern DRC, western Kenya and a part of Tanzania.

The Joluo people consider themselves 'Luo proper' and their Dholuo language is spoken by about 4.2 million Luo people in Kenya and Tanzania.

Caswell said for such languages with dialects, varieties and spelling standards, Google Translate “will tend to output the most common variety found online, but will also mix between varieties.”

“The models will certainly make some silly mistakes in translation, but each one of them has gone through testing and evaluation with native speakers. They are all ‘generally useful and right most of the time’, and community members have emphasized that they are useful!” the engineer wrote on X.

The latest update brings to 243 the number of languages Translate currently supports as Google works towards building AI models that will support the 1,000 world’s most spoken languages.