Google Translate now supporting 51 languages

Afrikaans, Icelandic, Yiddish, and more added to Google’s comprehensive translation tool

Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish.

Those are the nine new languages available for translating to and from in Google Translate, bringing the tool’s total number of available languages up to 51.

The upgrade further expands Google’s translation tool to such a breadth to make it highly competitive against other translation applications available online, like Yahoo Babel Fish and SDL’s FreeTranslation, according to Google yesterday,

By comparison, Yahoo Babel Fish only allows translating to and from 12 languages. FreeTranslation comes closer to Google, providing support for over 30 languages through its free translations and over 40 languages for its professional translations (which come at a cost, naturally).

As of now, Google does not provide any human/professional translating services, instead focusing on sophisticated techniques for perfecting automated translation. By inputting text blocks and accompanying translations into its translation databases, Google’s systems get better every day at their tasks. Additionally, users themselves can submit improvements if left unsatisfied with the translation given.

Just last week, Google released an upgrade to Google Docs enabling users to automatically translate their documents into another language, from 42 available. While users before could have merely copied the text from a document and plugged it into Google Translate, the update provided by Google conveniently implements the translation tool right into the Google Docs application.

Since this feature runs off of Google Translate technology, it’s probably safe to assume that Google Docs will soon be able to translate into 51 languages as well.

Already providing the capability to translate emails, Web pages, and RSS feeds, Google is quickly crowning itself king of the Web translators.