Mountain View, California — Internet search engine behemoth Google’s relentless efforts of translating languages of the world is slowly but sure coming to fruition. Google, over the weekend has bundled Latin to its automatic translation service, the 58th language supported by Google Translate and the first dead language in its repertoire, the company said in a blog post.
Google Translate, which supports more than 50 languages, including minority languages such as Welsh and Haitian Creole, said that it has added another language to the Google Translate roster, Latin.
What makes this language special is that this is the first “dead” language supported in Translate. While there are no native speakers of Latin today, it is by far one of the most used dead language and will surely please scholars and traditionalists. Google adopted a rather unique way of making the announcement, the entire blog post is written in Latin.
Google has added Latin to its list of languages on Google Translate…
According to the blog post written entirely in Latin by a senior engineer at Google, Jakob Uszkoreit, said that Latin is the 58th language to be supported by Google Translate, and it is the only supported language that is no longer used in the modern world, except in one or two cases.
“We are excited to announce our first translation system for a language with no native speakers at all. Most of the text that will ever be written in Latin has already been written and translated into other languages,” Uszkoreit wrote in the blog.
While it suggests that only few people will be able to crunch out what Google is saying just by stumbling onto the post, it also means that many will go directly to Translate to make sense of it, putting the new feature to good use before they even know about it.
“Hodie nuntiamus primum instrumentum convertendi linguam qua nulli nativi nunc utuntur: Latinam,” Jakob Uszkoreit, Ingeniarius Programmandi, dixit.
Or, if you prefer a language you actually understand: “Today, we announce the first language translation system by which no native speakers now make use of: the Latin,” the translated version of the post reads.
Google said the service would be useful for at least 100,000 American students who take the National Latin Exam every year, as well as to many more Latin language learners and scholars worldwide.
“As with every language, machine translating to and from Latin is a difficult problem and we know that our grasp of the ablative absolute or use of the subjunctive may occasionally be off,” it said.
“Moreover, unlike any of the other languages that Google Translate supports, Latin offers a unique advantage: most of the text that will ever be written in Latin has already been written, and a comparatively large part of it has been translated into other languages.”
Uszkoreit said that while Google realizes that the Latin translation tool would rarely be used to decode emails or captions on YouTube videos, it would enable web users to read many of the crucially important philosophical and scientific texts originally written in this language.
“There are tens of thousands of scanned books written in Latin on Google Books, and many more contain Latin quotes and proverbs,” he wrote.
Google has also added a Latin text-to-speech function, too, to help people with their pronunciation.