Google Translate to add Sinhala translations soon

Google Translate, another one of Google’s nifty creations, lets users translate text or web between languages. It currently supports translation of over 50 languages. And according to Rohan Jayaweera the Country Consultant for Google Sri Lanka, support for Sinhala on Google Translate will be added very soon.

Getting a new language on board is a long and hard process which comprises of creating required algorithms as well as gathering a large enough databases to tune it. It would have been particularly difficult to collect the data set for Sinhala, as the availability of the exact literature in both Sinhala and English being limited. However seems that the Google team have almost cracked it and would be releasing Sinhala support in the near future.

The addition of Sinhala would be a great boost to the Sinhala community for using the vast amount of information on the web with the ability to read it in their own native language. Their would be some accuracy issues involved as it is hard to obtain an optimum translation algorithm at the beginning.(As seen with few other languages on Google translate.) However those can be improved with further data input and tuning.

We will keep you updated on the addition of Sinhala Google Translation, which will definitely be a major step in the Sri Lankan web space!