Languages on Google Translate

Google Translate adding languages, Americans drinking more Red Bull. The translation engine and the caffeine industry, two products of the early-21st-century scale-up, both quietly exceeding their previous year. There is, presumably, a UN translator somewhere holding both products at once.

Google Translate's supported language count went from a handful in 2006 to over 100 in 2022, with the bulk of growth coming from the neural-machine-translation transition that made it economical to add lower-resource languages. US energy-drink sales doubled in the same window as Red Bull and Monster matured and the second wave (Celsius, Alani) expanded the category. Both lines reflect the same scaling pattern of the 2010s: one piece of infrastructure became cheap to expand (translation), one consumer category became cheap to launch into (functional beverage). Different aisles, same era.

Languages and stimulants, both more accessible. The decade lowered the cost of being awake and being understood.