Translating Lao

Today, we are adding Lao to Google Translate, making it our 65th supported language. We are excited to bring Lao content to users around the world, and to help Lao speakers access more of the world's web content in other languages.

The Google Translate team is constantly working to improve automatic translations, both for languages that have been available for some time, and for currently unavailable languages whose translation quality have yet to meet our launch standards. This work includes collecting new data from which our system can learn and grow smarter; changing the algorithms behind Google Translate; and improving the grammaticality of translations. There are many languages we work on that are not there yet but that we hope to launch in the future.

Support for Lao meets our launch standards, but translation quality is at the lower end compared to that of other languages we offer. We therefore designate Lao with an “alpha” status until we can make further improvements. While our Lao translations will be usable in some situations, like providing an English reader with the gist of an article written in Lao, they will fail in other situations where more precise translations are needed. We need your feedback in order to improve the quality of Lao translations.

There are two ways in which you can directly help us improve the quality of Lao translation, or that of any other language:

• Provide alternate translations by clicking on words or phrases of the translated sentence like in the example below:

     

• Use the Google Translator Toolkit to upload translations.

Your feedback is always greatly appreciated.  
ຂອບໃຈຫຼາຍໆເດີ້ (Thank you very much).

Posted by Thorsten Brants - Research Scientist, Google Translate