Kurdish Sorani dialect added to Google Translate

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Google revealed on Wednesday that it had added the Sorani dialect of the Kurdish language to Google Translate. 

Isaac Caswell, a Senior Software Engineer at Google Translate, said in a blog on the website of the company on Wednesday that it had added 24 new languages to Google Translate.

“For years, Google Translate has helped break down language barriers and connect communities all over the world. And we want to make this possible for even more people - especially those whose languages aren’t represented in most technology,” he said. “So today we’ve added 24 languages to Translate, now supporting a total of 133 used around the globe.”

We’re adding 24 new languages to Google Translate — the first using a breakthrough machine learning approach called Zero-Shot Machine Translation, where the model learns a new language without ever seeing a direct translation of it. #GoogleIO https://t.co/5Imnj6ff1E

— Google (@Google) May 11, 2022

Sorani is dominant in Kurdistan Region’s Erbil, Sulaimani and Halabja provinces, as well as the disputed province of Kirkuk. It has a large number of speakers in Kurdish areas of Iran, and is the official dialect of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). However, the dialect is not common in Duhok province where the Badini dialect is mostly spoken. 

The American company had already added the Kurmanji dialect of the Kurdish language to Google Translate.