english to french canadian google translate

And so that language isn’t represented online. 'The pattern all over the world is that someone speaks one language at home and then they write in the national language. They are spoken as household or community languages that are not regularly used in any kind of literate way,' said Cowell. 'Most of the world’s languages aren’t written. Group of Woodland Cree people, Fort George, James Bay, Quebec, 1893 He explained to VOA some of the challenges for a machine to translate Indigenous languages. University of Colorado linguist Andrew Cowell specializes in Indigenous-language documentation. 'Beyond that, we are working on new machine learning techniques that allow us to support the low resource languages with less training data.' 'One of those ways is we lean heavily on our contributor community, which allows native speakers to add valuable feedback, verify translations, et cetera, to languages that we do support, as well as languages we have yet to support,' said Burr. As it turns out, though, Cree is a 'low resource' language, which means there aren’t enough written translations of Cree documents to populate and 'train' automated translation systems like Google’s.īurr said Google is actively working toward adding more low resource languages. 'Indigenous languages are incredibly important to us,' Google spokesperson Justin Burr said via email. Cree, like many other indigenous languages, uses syllabics rather than the Latin alphabet. How can a company with 135,000 people working for it in 40 nations across the globe not find the resources to add Canada's most widely spoken Indigenous language?'Ĭree A close up of a proof from a freshly made Cree-language typeface. 'Google Translate does offer Maori, the Indigenous language of New Zealand, which is spoken by only about 50,000 persons. 'For me, it just doesn’t make sense,' John told VOA. That petition has so far received nearly all the 7,500 signatures he had hoped for. So Johns started up an online petition urging Google to add Cree to its translation engine. He assumed he could rely on Google Translate for help.īut the app, which supports 109 languages, does not offer Cree or any of the other roughly 150 Indigenous languages spoken today in North America. Johns wanted his feather-caped superhero to speak English, French and Cree, a language spoken by more than 95,000 First Nations people in Canada. Graphic shows Cree-speaking comic book superhero Bill Wawaate ('Northern Lights'), featured in the 'Citizen Canada' comic book series by Montreal designer/publisher Joseph Johns.

English to french canadian google translate