Google has added support for Marathi language for its Google Translate service. With this, Google Translate now supports eight Indian languages including Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. Globally, Google Translate supports a total of 70 languages at present. Google however notes that this language is still in experimental stage and therefore the translations are expected to be less accurate as compared to other languages. It has also enabled a transliterated input method on the service, thereby skipping the need for Indic keyboards to type in Indic languages. We tried to translate couple of sentences from Marathi to English but it failed to translate even basic sentences like 'What's the time?'. It appears that Google has started with couple of pre-defined sentences for translation. For example: What's the time can be asked in couple of ways in Marathi -- वेळ काय आहे? and किती वाजले आहेत? . Of course we believe this could improve over the time when people start giving suggestions to the service. Indic language support In Google Products In March 2013, Google Translate had also introduced offline language packages to its Android app with support for fifty languages including Hindi. One could download these language files on their Android phones and enable them from offline languages menu to make use of the service offline. In the same month, Google had also introduced support for six Indic languages on Gmail on feature phone browsers and released a text input app called Google Hindi Input, which allows users to type in Hindi on their Android phones. In May 2012, Google had introduced automatic message translation on Gmail with support…
