Google Translate adds Kurdish Sorani

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Google Translate on Wednesday announced it will add 24 new languages, including the Kurdish dialect of Sorani.

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

“For years, Google Translate has helped break down language barriers and connect communities all over the world,” Google said in a blog post on Wednesday.

“And we want to make this possible for even more people — especially those whose languages aren’t represented in most technology. So today we’ve added 24 languages to Translate, now supporting a total of 133 used around the globe.”

In the blog post, Google stated that Sorani is “used by about eight million people, mostly in Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan).”

In 2016, Google announced it had added Kurmanji Kurdish to its translation service, alongside 12 other languages, but not Sorani, which is spoken in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhilat), in addition to the southern parts of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

Read More: Google can now translate in Kurdish

Google is not the only website that offers Kurdish translation.

In 2020, Microsoft added two Kurdish dialects to Microsoft Translator, another sign of more online recognition of the Kurdish language that has been repressed by many states in the region.

Read More: Microsoft adds two Kurdish dialects to Microsoft Translator

Facebook also offers Sorani Kurdish translation, but so far, it is not possible to translate Facebook posts from Kurmanji to other languages.