Google Translate, the technology responsible for fueling many a foreign Skype (News - Alert) romance, has just added Khmer, the official language of Cambodia, to its retinue of featured languages.

Khmer is the 66th language supported by Google Translate. Google (News - Alert) is still only ankle-deep in the world's vast ocean of lingos when you consider that there are roughly 6,500 languages in the world today.

Still, Google Translate has come a long way since its launch in 2006, when it supported only English and Arabic.

Around 16 million people are native speakers of Khmer. Most of those people are native citizens of Cambodia.

Google Translate now comes with its own Khmer virtual keyboard and support for phonetic text. 

Image via Softpedia

Google has said that adding the language has been challenging because of a general lack of Khmer resources on the Web, and because Khmer works so uniquely as a language. For instance, words in Khmer are not usually separated by spaces. 

Google follows Apple (News - Alert) in its functional recognition of Khmer. Apple added support for the Cambodian language to OS X Lion back in 2011.

Last September, Google added its 65th language, Lao, to its Google Translate offering. The company has promised to continue to develop additional languages, and advises users who are looking to translate a language not yet supported by Google, to use it on publicly available websites and upload translations to Google's translator kit. 

Google Translate functions by using statistical machine translation (SMT), where computers analyze millions of existing translated documents from the Web to learn vocabulary and distinguish patterns in a language. Google Translate then picks the most statistically probable translation when asked to translate a chunk of text. As most familiar with the tool know, it's not 100 percent accurate (sometimes it's a downright goofy translation), but it mostly gets the job done.