A screengrab of an English sentence translated into Iban on Google Translate.
KUCHING (June 29): Iban has been added among the languages for translation in the Google Translate service.
An announcement on Google’s official blog The Keyword on June 27 stated Iban as well as Cantonese, NKo and Tamazight are among 110 new languages added to Google Translate using artificial intelligence (AI).
According to Google Translate senior software engineer Isaac Caswell in the announcement, this was the tool’s largest expansion ever made possible through its PaLM 2 large language model.
“From Cantonese to Q’eqchi’, these new languages represent more than 614 million speakers — opening up translations for around 8 per cent of the world’s population. Some are major world languages with over 100 million speakers.
“Others are spoken by small communities of indigenous people and a few have almost no native speakers but active revitalisation efforts,” he said.
He explained PaLM 2 was key piece to the puzzle, helping Google Translate more efficiently learn languages that are closely related to each other.
“Google Translate breaks down language barriers to help people connect and better understand the world around them.
“We are always applying the latest technologies so more people can access this tool — in 2022, we added 24 new languages using Zero-Shot Machine Translation, where a machine learning model learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example.
“We also announced the 1,000 Languages Initiative; a commitment to build AI models that will support the 1,000 most spoken languages around the world,” he said.
Talks of the Iban language being added into Google Translate have been around lately, following an announcement by Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai at the annual Google’s Developer Conference 2022 in California.
The Borneo Post on May 13, 2022 reported that Iban would be included in Google Translate after ‘Jaku Iban’ was seen in a slide presentation during Sundar’s speech.