Illaccanqui, who was not involved in Google’s project.

“It will help put Quechua and Spanish on the same status,” said Mr. Its status began to decline following the Spanish conquest of Peru more than 400 years ago.Īdding it to the languages recognized by Google is a big victory for Quechua language activists like Luis Illaccanqui, a Peruvian who created the website Qichwa 2.0, which includes dictionaries and resources for learning the language.

Quechua was the lingua franca of the Inca Empire, which stretched from what is now southern Colombia to central Chile. But it will also likely draw criticism from those frustrated by previous tech products that failed to understand the nuances of their language or culture.īig backers of public schools in Texas? Rural Republicans. The news from the California company’s annual I/O technology showcase may be celebrated in many corners of the world. “We looked at languages with very large, underserved populations,” Google research scientist Isaac Caswell told reporters. It is also adding a number of widely spoken African and South Asian languages that have been missing from popular tech products. It added 24 of them this week, including Quechua and other Indigenous South American languages such as Guarani and Aymara. The internet giant says new artificial intelligence technology is enabling it to vastly expand Google Translate’s repertoire of the world’s languages. That changed on Wednesday, when Google added Quechua and a variety of other languages to its digital translation service.

About 10 million people speak Quechua, but trying to automatically translate emails and text messages into the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in the Americas was long all but impossible.

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