Frankly though, I imagine the vast majority of those languages are unappealing targets in terms of return on investment.

and much smaller training data..

I guess they really don't need to cover all of them though as most of the people speaking a language with low number of speakers would be able to converse in other mainstream languages as well. I can speak four languages but I rarely converse in two of them as speakers of the two languages are usually comfortable with a mainstream language as well.

The most obvious thing to me is to use an intermediate language - I assume this has already been discussed extensively, anyone have references?

edit: I should have scrolled down https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-translation-too...

Even Swedish is barely in the top 100 with 8.7 million speakers.