Earlier today, Google announced that they have added 5 more regional Indian languages, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu and Kannada to their Translate service. The addition of this, will potentially increase Google’s reach by half a billion people.

Mr Ashish Venugopal, Research Scientist, Google, said, “Beginning today, you can explore the linguistic diversity of the Indian sub-continent with Google translate, which now supports five new experimental alpha languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu. In India and Bangladesh alone, more than 500 million people speak these five languages. Since 2009, we've launched a total of 11 alpha languages, bringing the current number of languages supported by Google Translate to 63.”

Mr Venugopal said that as of now these languages, when translated using Google Translator, will not be able to translate all the words. As there is not enough content on the web in these Indian languages, it will be difficult to apply statistical machine translation approach which Google applies in Spanish and Chinese language.

“Despite these challenges, we release alpha languages when we believe that they help people better access the multilingual web. If you notice incorrect or missing translations for any of our languages, please correct us; we enjoy learning from our mistakes and your feedback helps us graduate new languages from alpha status. Since these languages each have their own unique scripts, we have enabled a transliterated input method for those of you without Indian language keyboards,” he added.