Google's smarter, A.I.-powered translation system expands to more languages

Last fall, Google introduced a new system for machine-assisted language translations, Google Neural Machine Translation system (GNMT), which takes advantage of deep neural networks to translate entire sentences – not just phrases – for greatly improved translations. The company put the system to work in Google Translate for eight language pairs in November, and is today expanding support to three more: Russian, Hindi and Vietnamese. Neural Machine Translation went into action late last year with support for translating to and from English and French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Turkish. These represent the native languages of around one-third of the world's population, covering more than 35% of all Google Translate queries, the company said at the time. Today's news is also fairly significant in terms of scale, as in the U.S. alone, 1,292,448 people speak Vietnamese; another 836,171 speak Russian; and 586,173 speak Hindi, Google says, citing U.S. census data. And more languages will be added in weeks ahead, including Thai, which didn't quite make today's release.