If when you hear the words and expressions “Tabarnak”, “Throw a log”, “Pass a tree” or even “Talk through your hat”, you don’t know what they mean, perhaps it is appropriate to learn Quebecois.
To prepare for a possible stay in Quebec, Google Translate now offers a translation to Quebec and vice versa, as the company confirmed to Tech&Co on October 22.
In a widely circulated tweet, an Internet user explains that he was able to translate texts from English to Quebec. But it is also possible to translate from French (from France) to Canadian French. Enough to better understand terms like “balado” (“podcast”) or “magasiner” (“shopping”), used in Quebec, where the fight against anglicisms is much fiercer than in France.
Better include communities around the world
The novelty is part of a more global initiative by Google to put its artificial intelligence models into operation, and more specifically the one dedicated to linguistics. The search giant’s goal is to support a thousand different languages.
Therefore, Quebecois is not the only new language that can be translated. Google also added Inuktut, a dialect spoken by more than 40,000 people in Canada, primarily the Inuit of Canada, Greenland and Alaska.
Adding a language to Google Translate is not easy. Interviewed by La Presse, Isaac Caswell, a Google engineer, explains that there must be enough textual data online to create a model.
For this reason, in Canada’s indigenous languages it is only Inuktut: “We don’t want to put anything in the product that only produces choppy text or that doesn’t make sense,” he emphasizes.
Inuktut has the advantage of being based on writings and extensive data, especially thanks to a growing community. Google also relied on the organization that represents the Canadian Inuit, in particular so that Google Translate could translate “the two writing systems of the language”, that is, the syllabic and Roman alphabets. In June 2024, Breton, Cantonese and Wolof were added.
Source: BFM TV
