Speaking in more languages
Posted by Vlad Patryshev, software
engineer
Many Google products (
currently support more than 170 languages, from Abhazian to Zulu.
Translations into most of these languages are done by volunteers
from around the world who are eager to help people view and search
the web in their own native language. To facilitate how we go about
getting these languages, we created a volunteer translation
program: Google In
Your Language.
Anybody can sign up as a volunteer translator by visiting the
Tools page and then clicking on the
link. After verification, you'll be offered a list of
products to translate, including the main search site, Gmail,
iGoogle, Google Maps, and many others
Although the amount of translation for each project is not
overwhelming, it usually takes weeks for an individual volunteer to
finish translating one site. Once a reasonable percentage of
translations for Google pages in a given language is submitted,
we'll add your language to production and, after a bit of time,
you'll be able to see them in yet another language.
Some "volunteer" languages are well represented and are
nearly finished being translated, i.e. Armenian, Estonian,
Slovenian are 95% complete; even Latin has 70% of its translations
done. Representatives of other languages are not as active, i.e.
Abhazian has been available for several years, but so far we
don't have enough translations completed to release it into
production. Tibetan, Inupak, Inuktikut, Wolof, Zhuang all have less
than 10% of their content translated. Interestingly, each of those
has more speakers than Faroese, which has 74% of texts
translated.
Recently we have added a bunch of new languages to the Google In
Your Language program, including Navajo, Filipino, several Russian
Federation languages (Avaric, Chechen, Chuvash, Komi), and some
African languages (Akan, Bambara, Gikuyu, Kongo, Ndebele, Ndongo,
Nyanja, Venda). Our hope is to attract even more volunteers to
participate in this program so that Google can speak all the
world's languages one day.
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