Earlier this month Google expanded the number of languages available in Google Translate. While the press release and most other coverage talked about ten new languages, the number of language pairs (from language X to language Y) increased far more substantially. Previously, Yahoo! Babel Fish had the most with 38 pairs. Google not only upped the number of possible languages, but every language listed can translate to the other. So depending on how you count, Google Translate now has over 500 language pairs available! That's a major increase. As Google Operating System notes, the counting varies depending on how you count Chinese. Only one choice is given for input of "Chinese," but Google Translate seems to accept both the Simplified or Traditional versions. Output can specify either Simplified or Traditional. So, if you count both versions of Chinese as one languages, this means Google Translate can machine translate 506 language pairs. If you consider that as two, it would be 552. And do note that you can input either version of Chinese characters and have it translated to the other.

Also note that Google has not only expanded its machine translation abilities but has augmented its Translated Search as well. Translated Search (also available on the Language Tools page as "Search Across Languages") will translate the query words and then display results in both the original language and in translation. Google translated search can machine translate query words and pages between the following languages. The following ten languages have been added along with the ability to translate between any of the possible language pairs.

• Bulgarian
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Finnish
• Hindi
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Romanian
• Swedish

Presumably, Google has been able to make such a major expansion of language translation pairs available by using statistical machine translation developed in house. This process is described in their FAQ: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model." Moving to this approach certainly seems to have allowed such a major expansion. Bear in mind that all of this automatic translation is prone to error, although it should give some rough sense of the underlying meaning. I've updated my Online Translation and Translated Search pages with the new languages.

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