The translator actually does relatively well, although there are definite oddities: It's interesting to take your comments and translate them from English into the various languages and translate them back again. In all likelihood, the order in which Google adds languages is probably determined partly by economics (relatively small numbers of speakers of languages used in wealthy countries will provide more advertising revenue than large numbers of speakers of languages used in poor countries) and partly by the availability of sufficiently large amounts of bilingual text, which they use to train their statistical translator.
If Google were trying to add languages in descending order of number of speakers, they should have added such languages as Indonesian, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, Marathi and Vietnamese. Moreover, in several cases the demand for translation into the language is probably small: most Scandinavians, for example, are comfortable in English. The others have a modest number of speakers. Hindi is the exception, with over 300 million speakers. The interesting thing about the languages added is that they do not for the most part represent the next most widely spoken languages.
These comprise less than one-half of one percent of the world's languages, but their speakers include more than half of the world's population. With the languages previously available (Arabic, Chinese (traditional and simplified writing), Dutch, English, French,German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish), Google now handles 23 languages. Google Translate has added ten languages to its repertoire: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech,Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian,Polish, Romanian and Swedish.
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