Google learns 10 new languages

The addition of Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish brings the total number of languages to 23.

The service now has the option to translate text and web pages, as well as perform cross-language searches between any two languages in the list.

Jeff Chin, a product manager for Google, wrote in the company's official blog: "For example, we now support Chinese translation to/from any of our languages (e.g. Chinese to French).

"So for those of you who will be following or attending the Olympics in Beijing, you'll be able to more easily find and access content from local sources."

Google has also added a 'Detect Language' option to help automatically identify the language of the text being translated. Chin admitted, however, that the system is not perfect.

"Machine translation is a hard problem, but it plays an important role in helping people access content they might otherwise be unable to read," he said.

A 'Suggest a Better Translation' feature allows users to correct inaccurate translations in an effort to refine the service.

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