Languages on Google Translate

Google Translate adding languages and Americans buying more candy and chocolate. Two scaling stories of the early 21st century, on the same upward path. The translation engine is not particularly fond of confectionery. The confectionery is not, technically, multilingual. The graph, generously, makes them pen pals.

Google Translate's supported language count went from a handful in 2006 to over 100 by 2022, with neural-machine-translation making lower-resource languages economical to add. US candy and chocolate sales climbed steadily across the same window as larger-format and premium chocolate categories grew alongside seasonal consumption peaks. Two unrelated infrastructure-and-consumer stories sharing a decade because both lines were creatures of the same scaling century: cheap to add a language, cheap to add a SKU.

Adding things became cheap in many directions at once. The world's vocabulary and its candy aisle both expanded.