What’s the world’s most multilingual website?
It’s not Facebook. Not Google. Not even Wikipedia.
It’s the website of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, at just over 1,000 languages.
But Google has been working since 2022 to leverage AI to take Google Translate past 1,000 languages.
In late June, Google announced that Google Translate had added 110 languages: From Cantonese to Qʼeqchiʼ, these new languages represent more than 614 million speakers, opening up translations for around 8% of the world’s population.
So Google Translate now supports roughly 240 languages — still a long ways from JW.org — but gaining.
The Google Translate language menu is getting awfully large!
But I should also note that Google is feeling the heat from OpenAI, which offers a spoken text translation engine that already supports more than 50 languages.
This linguistic competition is excellent to see, as it ultimately benefits the hundreds of millions of speakers of so-called “minority” languages. These folks have been underserved for far too long.
As I’ve long said: The Internet connects computers but language connects people.
