Thus, the French term “râler” becomes “chiâler” when we choose the French-Canadian option. Quebecois expressions such as “I'm full of my helmet” are recognized by Google's software, which translates them to “I'm fed up” in French from France.
Right now, Google's “Canadian French” is based primarily on the expressions of Quebecers and doesn't really include the expressions of other French-speaking communities in the country. According to tests conducted by Radio-Canada.
In addition to Canadian French, Google Translate added slang or other dialects to its offerings on Tuesday. Last June, Google Translate also added at least 110 new languages to its offering.
These additions are part of Google's initiative to develop a single AI language model to support 1,000 of the world's most spoken languages.
Last week, Google made a splash by incorporating Canada's first indigenous language into its translation service. Inuktut, a general term that includes various dialects spoken by Inuit in Canada, Greenland and Alaska, has been added to the popular program.
About 40,000 people speak Inuktut in Canada, according to Statistics Canada data.
Isaac Caswell, the platform's principal software engineer, said the number of speakers alone is not enough to determine whether a language can be included in Google Translate.
There must also be enough text data online to extract from to create a language model.
Other Indigenous languages in Canada “simply don't have enough data to have a usable machine translation model,” Caswell said.
With information from The Canadian Press
