Google has just announced it has added Lao as its 65th language to the Google Translate service. But the new language (currently in alpha) is not yet offered in Google Chrome’s translation feature.

Six years ago Google first announced their approach to statistical machine translation and the company has since focused primarily on core translation quality and language coverage. Today, with the recent addition of Lao, Google can translate among any of 65 different languages, including, as we reported in May, many with a small web presence, such as Bengali, Basque, Swahili, Yiddish, and even Esperanto.

‘Lao’ or ‘Laotian’ is spoken in Laos, Thailand, the U.S., France, Canada, China, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina. In Laos, it is the official language. As of 2006, there were a reported 5.22 million native speakers.

“We are excited to bring Lao content to users around the world, and to help Lao speakers access more of the world's web content in other languages,” said Minqi Jiang , Google Translate Associate Product Manager.

“The Google Translate team is constantly working to improve automatic translations, both for languages that have been available for some time, and for currently unavailable languages whose translation quality have yet to meet our launch standards. This work includes collecting new data from which our system can learn and grow smarter; changing the algorithms behind Google Translate; and improving the grammaticality of translations. There are many languages we work on that are not there yet but that we hope to launch in the future,” said Jiang in a post on the Google Translate blog.

If you know Lao, Google could use your help. You can contribute in two ways: provide alternate translations by clicking on words or phrases of the translated sentence and use the Google Translator Toolkit to upload translations.

By Alex Dupont
Marketing Communications Specialist
Language Translation Inc.

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