Google Translate has become a powerful tool for people who need quick, on-point translations. If you have the smartphone app, you can download language packages to translate phrases completely offline, but it's not available for all the languages Google Translate currently supports. Still, Google is making an active effort to not only support more languages but it also wants to roll out this offline option to more and more of them. And now, the company just introduced a bunch of new languages that you can now translate without going online.
Google has just expanded the offline translation functionality to a whopping 33 new languages, as announced by the company in a blog post. This means that if you ever have to translate to, or from, any of these languages, you don't need an online connection as long as you download the right language package. Google is launching this functionality for the following languages:
- Basque
- Cebuano
- Chichewa
- Corsican
- Frisian
- Hausa
- Hawaiian
- Hmong
- Igbo
- Javanese
- Khmer
- Kinyarwanda
- Kurdish
- Lao
- Latin
- Luxembourgish
- Malagasy
- Maori
- Myanmar (Burmese)
- Oriya / Odia
- Samoan
- Scots Gaelic
- Sesotho
- Shona
- Sindhi
- Sundanese
- Tatar
- Turkmen
- Uyghur
- Xhosa
- Yiddish
- Yoruba
- Zulu
Many of these languages have millions of native speakers — Zulu, for one, has about 12 million native speakers — so this update ensures your borders are vastly expanded, and that you can quickly translate text in those languages if you find yourself in need to do so. It can help you get by if you ever find yourself traveling somewhere those languages are spoken.
If you wish to check out these new languages, make sure to update the Google Translate app as soon as you can. From there, you can download offline translation packages for these new languages in the same exact way you can currently download packages for languages like Spanish or French.