Google Translate is getting offline support for 59 languages, including 7 from India

• Google Translate’s Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology will now also be available offline on iOS and Android.
• Offline NMT support will be available in 59 languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu from the pool of Indian languages.

After introducing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) capabilities for Indian languages in April last year, Google is making that same feature available offline on it’s Google Translate app, on both iOS and Android.

Offline support may be rolling out in 59 languages, but it holds greater significance for countries where network penetration has yet to reach its potential and connectivity suffers due to network congestion.

That is to say, countries like India.

The significance of NMT lies in its approach to machine translation. It uses a neural network to make its translations. Graduating from the phrase by phrase system of translation, the NMT system goes sentence by sentence instead, making it faster and more efficient.

(Source: Google)

As the image shows, offline translation isn’t quite accurate yet but ‘almost’ as good as it’s online counterpart.

Considering that 422 million people identify with Hindi as their primary language, Google Translate may hold the potential to bridge the English-Hindi divide in India. Not to mention that the demand for localised content is on the rise as well.

According to Google, each language set only takes up 35-45MB. So, the download is small and won’t take up too much space on phones. Not only is that useful for entry-level smartphone users and users in low connectivity areas, but also for tourists visiting India constrained by roaming charges.

The rollout of offline translation is phased, so some users may have to wait a little longer than others before they have the update on their devices.