Google on Monday announced that it had added nine new languages to its Translate service.
Included in the update (which actually went live early last week) are Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh, and Yiddish. This brings the total number of languages the service is able to translate to 51.
Like other Google Translate updates, these changes will eventually go out to other services where the machine translation is used, including Google Friend Connect, Google Talk, Gmail, and most recently Google Docs. However, the new languages have not shown up on any of those services just yet.
In late June, Google pushed out an alpha version of Persian translating to meet the needs of increased activity around the Iranian presidential elections. The company continues to note that Persian translations, along with some of these latest additions, will not be as precise as translations to and from some more widely used languages; it will take time to get the quality up to the same level as its Spanish, German, and French translations, which were the first to be offered.
