Google Translate has added Limburgish as a new language. Google’s neural machine translation service, which now supports over 200 languages, can now also translate texts, documents, and websites to and from Limburgish. The update with the new version including Limburgish will likely go live on Thursday afternoon.
Texts in different variants of Limburgish can be translated into other languages in Google Translate. For translations from other languages into Limburgish, the Maastrichtian variant is mainly used. These translations show spelling variations and do not always follow the 2003 Spelling for Limburgish Dialects. Google has developed its own language model for Limburgish. The Limburgish Academy hopes to contribute to government policy for an official spelling and the digitization of the language so that Limburgish, with all its richness, becomes available in digital language products.
The goal of Google Translate is to primarily convey the essence of a text in translations from languages such as Japanese or Spanish into Limburgish. Google Translate’s translations are not intended to be as accurate as human translations.
These investments come at a time when the province of Limburg is investigating whether to apply for Part III status under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages for Limburgish, similar to Frisian and Papiamento. Yuri Michielsen, chairman of the Limburgish Academy, said, “Many linguistic and social organizations and IT companies want to advance the Limburgish language. The Limburgish Academy hopes that the Limburgish government will decide to apply for Part III recognition this fall to seriously work together on the preservation and further (digital) development of Limburgish.”
The Limburgish Academy lobbies and provides input to IT companies like Google to include Limburgish in their IT products. Thanks to the Limburgish Academy, Microsoft SwiftKey and Google Gboard have already added Limburgish to their Android mobile keyboards. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, is also currently working on a Limburgish language corpus.
