Pichai speaks during the Google I/O 2022. — Screengrab via YouTube/Google
KUCHING (May 13): There were many major announcements at the annual Google’s Developer Conference (Google I/O) 2022, much to the delight of tech communities around the globe including those in Sarawak.
During his keynote address, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai showed Iban as among the languages to be included in Google Translate.
On a slide that accompanied Pichai’s presentation on the search engine’s soon-to-be-enhanced language tool, there was a group of over 40 languages to be made available for real-time translation in future, including ‘Jaku Iban’.
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“Real-time translation is a testament to how knowledge and computing come together to make people’s lives better.
“More people are using Google Translate than ever before, but we still have work to do to make it universally accessible,” Pichai said right before that particular slide was shown during the broadcast from the headquarters in Mountain View, California on Wednesday.
Other Southeast Asian languages seen on the slide were Base Betawi (Jakarta), Baso Minangkabau (West Sumatra), Amanung Kapampangan (Philippines), and Tetun Dili (East Timor).
According to Pichai, there is a long tail of languages that are underrepresented on the web currently and “translating them is a hard technical problem”.
“That’s because translation models are usually trained with bilingual text; for example, the same phrase in both English and Spanish.
“However, there’s not enough publicly available bilingual text for every language,” he pointed out.
Pichai’s slide showed ‘Jaku Iban’ among other languages that may be included in Google Translate in the future. – Screengrab via YouTube/Google
He said with advances in machine learning, Google has developed a monolingual approach where the model would learn to translate a new language without ever seeing a direct translation of it.
“By collaborating with native speakers and institutions, we found these translations were of sufficient quality to be useful,” he added.
Pichai later announced 24 new languages had been added into Google Translate, including the first indigenous language of the Americas.
“Together, these languages are spoken by more than 300 million people. Breakthroughs like this are powering a radical shift in how we access knowledge and use computers,” he said.
Most of the 24 languages comprised those from the Indian subcontinent, with the only Southeast Asian specific language on the list being Ilocano (Philippines).
However, the inclusion of Jaku Iban among the languages displayed on screen during Pichai’s speech hinted that it would only be a matter of time before the real-time online translation of Iban language could be done with just one click.
Watch the full Google I/O keynote here.