On June 27, 2024, Google announced that it was adding 110 new languages to Google Translate at once, the service’s largest single expansion. The new languages represent more than 614 million speakers - around 8% of the world’s population - and pushed Translate well past 100 languages toward broader global coverage.
The expansion was made possible by Google’s PaLM 2 large language model. Google noted that PaLM 2 was especially helpful for efficiently learning languages closely related to one another, such as varieties close to Hindi like Awadhi and Marwadi, and French-based creoles like Seychellois Creole and Mauritian Creole. This reflects a broader shift in machine translation: rather than building each language pair separately, large multilingual models let related languages share what they learn, so adding many languages at once becomes feasible.
About a quarter of the new languages came from Africa - including Fon, Kikongo, Luo, Ga, Swati, Venda, and Wolof - making it Google’s largest expansion of African language support. Other additions ranged from Cantonese, one of the most-requested languages, to languages spoken by small communities or undergoing revitalization, such as Manx, whose last native speaker had died in 1974.
The launch shows how large language models reshaped the economics of multilingual translation. Where earlier systems needed substantial parallel data for every new language, a strong multilingual foundation model can extend usable translation to the long tail of human languages much faster, continuing the industry-wide push - alongside Meta’s No Language Left Behind - to reach speakers that AI translation had previously left out.