Google adds first Indigenous language in Canada to its translation service

One of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in this country is now available through Google's translation service, the first time the tech giant has included a First Nations, Metis or Inuit language spoken in Canada on its platform.

One of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in this country is now available through Google's translation service, the first time the tech giant has included a First Nations, Métis or Inuit language spoken in Canada on its platform.

Inuktut, a broad term encompassing different dialects spoken by Inuit in Canada, Greenland and Alaska, has been added to Google Translate, which translates text, documents and websites from one language into another.

The latest addition is part of a Google initiative to develop a single artificial intelligence language model to support 1,000 of the most spoken languages in the world.

There are roughly 40,000 Inuktut speakers in Canada, data from Statistics Canada suggests.

The number of speakers alone is not enough to determine whether a language can be included in Google Translate, said Isaac Caswell, a senior software engineer with the platform.

There also has to be enough online text data to pull from to create a language model.

Other Indigenous languages in Canada have "had simply too little data to have any usable machine translation model," said Caswell.