Google Translate is a free automatic translation service provided by the American company Alphabet launched in 2006. You can translate texts of less than 3900 characters and WEB pages.
In 2009 Google added Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
In May 2022, Google added 24 new languages: Assamese, Aymara, Bambara, Bhojpuri, Dhivehi, Dogri, Ewe, Guarani, Ilocano, Konkani, Krio, Lingala, Luganda, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), Mizo, Oromo, Quechua, Sanskrit, Sepedi, Sorani Kurdish, Tigrinya, Tsonga, and Twi. These are mainly languages spoken in India by millions of people. Bhojpuri is spoken by 50 million people compared to Breton spoken by only 200,000 people.
However they also added Sanskrit spoken by only 20,000 people, and Scottish Gaelic, which has been there since 2009, is only spoken by 60,000 people. Corsican and Basque have also been on the list since 2016.
For Breton to appear, the excuse of not being able to send a large corpus of texts with translations is no longer valid since Google has just abandoned its method based on statistics (SMT) for a method based on its corpus of texts in all languages entitled Zero-Shot Machine Translation (ZMT). This method does not seem as good as the previous one, but it makes it possible to offer more languages. Before, with the statistical method, Google needed thousands, even millions of pages translated on the internet and Bretons did provide this corpus.
The new translation system developed by Google uses all translations. For example, to translate from Breton into English, the engine could use translations from Breton into French, then from French into English or even through Welsh. In the past, translations from Finnish into Greek were impossible, but are now possible through intermediate translations.
The ZMT therefore accelerates the possibility for Breton to soon be one of the languages translated by Google. Other languages are in the pipeline such as Romansh, Cherokee or Tibetan, and Breton? The system just needs enough Bretons to send Breton language texts with their translation in French so that Breton appears.
To contribute to the appearance of Breton on Google Translate, go to this page .
