The announcement comes on the heels of another language-related news blip from the Mountain View, California, company. Google said last week that its Google Translate service -- which changes text from one language to another -- handles as much translation work in a day as human translators could manage in a year.

"In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you'd find in 1 million books," the company said.

That is, of course, pretty incredible. But all of this translation talk is also generating discussion about the weaknesses of current computer-translation technology.

Writing for The Atlantic, anthropologist Sarah Kendzior bemoans the fact that so many languages aren't represented by Google.

"Since its inception in 2006, Google has added 65 languages from areas extending across much of the world, though two exceptions stand out: Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa," she writes. "No languages from Central Asia -- such as Pashto, Usbek, and Uyghur -- make the Google cut. Neither do the African languages Hausa, Yoruba, or Zulu. The sole inclusions from sub-Saharan Africa are Swahili and Afrikaans."

Furthermore, accuracy is always a nagging and unavoidable topic of discussion when it comes to Internet translation services.

Like many people, I use Google Translate as a starting point for translation, but don't necessarily trust that it will get everything right. It's great for getting the gist of a news story that's published in Japanese or Finnish, but if I need to write a formal letter to someone in one of those languages, I'd get human help.

Google acknowledges as much on a Web page about Translate:

"When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be.