Khmer, the official language of Cambodia, is now the 66th language supported by Google Translate!

You may recall last year’s addition of Lao or Laotian, the official language of Laos, as the 65thlanguage to the Google Translate service. Well it appears that with the addition of Khmer, the search engine giant decided to remain in the immediate geographic vicinity, since Laos shares a border with Cambodia.

The launch comes with the ability to use a virtual keyboard and the ability to read Khmer text phonetically, for users who don’t read the Khmer alphabet.

“What better way to start Cambodian New Year than with the addition of the Khmer language to Google Translate as our 66th supported language. We hope that this will help open up the web to Khmer speakers and likewise make Khmer content more accessible to the rest of the world,” wrote Arne Mauser, Software Engineer, on behalf of the Google Translate Team in a recent blog post.

Khmer is spoken by nearly 16 million native speakers who are primarily concentrated in Cambodia.

“Khmer is a challenging language for translation systems for two reasons,” says Mauser. “There isn’t a lot of Khmer data on the web and words are not usually separated by spaces; so in addition to teaching our translation system a new language, it also has to learn how to separate words (what we call segmentation).”

“Over time, we will improve the system and make our Khmer translations better,” Mauser adds. “We constantly improve our algorithm when we find new translations and learn from your alternative translations.”

Google says the language now meets its standards to be launched in Alpha status. It also says that if it doesn’t already support your language, that you can rest assured, they’re working on it.