Google Translate now supports Cantonese after its biggest language expansion, driven by AI

The Google tool can translate between Cantonese and 242 other languages by text or voice inputs

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Google Translate has added support for 110 new languages with the help of AI. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 2:00pm, 28 Jun 2024

Google has added Cantonese to its Google Translate service, as part of its largest-ever expansion that saw 110 new languages being supported, aided by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technology.

From Thursday, users of the app and browser versions of the Google tool can translate between 243 languages, including Cantonese, a Chinese dialect widely spoken in Hong Kong, Macau, parts of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, as well as some Chinese migrant communities worldwide.

Google Translate can process and generate both text and voice, meaning that users can type or speak in one language, then read or listen to the translation.

“Cantonese has long been one of the most requested languages” for the service, Isaac Caswell, senior software engineer at Google Translate, wrote in a blog post. “Because Cantonese often overlaps with Mandarin in writing, it’s tricky to find data and train models.”

Cantonese and Mandarin are both written in Chinese characters, but Cantonese has some differences in grammar, terms and structure.

With the help of the US tech company’s PaLM 2 large language model (LLM), launched over a year ago, Google Translate can learn languages that are closely related to each other more efficiently, according to Caswell.

The rapid advancement of LLMs – the technology behind a new breed of intelligent AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini chatbot – has set off a race among Big Tech companies and start-ups to roll out new service features and improve existing functions.