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Search engine Google on Tuesday launched a new neural machine translation technology between English and nine widely used Indian languages — Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam and Kannada.
“Neural translation offers a huge improvement over the old phrase-based system, translating full sentences at a time, instead of pieces of a sentence. This change improves the quality of translation in a single jump than seen in the last 10 years combined,” Google said in a release.
Google also announced the extension of neural machine translation to Chrome browser’s built-in auto-translate functionality to web content, making full-page translations more accurate and easier to read.
“India today has 234 million Indian language users who’re online, compared with 175 million English web users. We expect another 300 million Indian language users to come online in the next four years. With today’s launch, we’re taking a huge step forward to bring down the barriers that stop language users to get more out of the internet and also help the industry solve for the needs of billion Indians,” said Rajan Anandan, V-P, India & South East Asia, Google, sharing insights from Google-KPMG’s joint report “Indian Languages — Defining India’s Internet”.
The new translation capability will also be available to users on Google Search and Maps, both on mobile and desktop. “With this update, millions of reviews – from restaurants to cafes or hotels – will appear in the language selected by the users on their device in addition to the original language of the review,” it said.
With the Google-KPMG report expecting nine out of 10 new online users as Indian language use, it has also extended support to cover all 22 Scheduled Indian languages and rolled out new Gboard (keyboard for Android launched in December 2016) with transliteration support for Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, and Gujarati, which will allow users to search and use Google Translate on keyboards.
Users can also opt for Hinglish language with new text editing tool that makes it easier to select, copy, paste and repositioning the keyboard so it fits into the hand and texting style.
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