Microsoft Translator launches 13 new African languages

Software giant Microsoft has added 13 new African languages to its Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator.

Microsoft said this will enable text and documents to be translated to and from these languages across the entire Microsoft ecosystem of products and services.

Translator aims to break the language barrier between people and cultures all over the world.

To achieve this, Microsoft has continuously added languages and dialects to this service while ensuring the translation quality of the supported languages by using the latest neural machine translation (NMT) techniques.

Languages

The 13 new African languages include:

Four South African languages:

• Sesotho (Southern Sotho)
• Sesotho sa Leboa (Northern Sotho)
• Setswana (Tswana)
• Xhosa are the latest of South Africa’s official language to be supported.

This follows last year’s release of Zulu.

The other languages are:

• chiShona
• Hausa
• Igbo
• Kinyarwanda
• Lingala
• Luganda
• Nyanja
• Rundi
• Yoruba

“This brings the total number of supported languages to 124 and adds language support for millions of people in Africa and worldwide,” Microsoft said.

Mission

Lillian Barnard, CEO of Microsoft South Africa, said the release highlights the company’s mission to build meaningful cognitive products and services that improve accessibility and empower local communities.

“As the benefits and value of translation support become more evident, particularly for African languages, we will see it help break down language barriers and enable more people to connect with each other and technology in a way that empowers them to do and achieve more.

“The addition of new African languages means that more people are able to connect and that language will become a seamless feature of using technology,” said Barnard.

Integrations

Integrations across Microsoft’s ecosystem include Microsoft 365 for translating text and documents, the Microsoft Edge browser and Bing search engine for translating whole webpages, SwiftKey for translating messages, LinkedIn for translating user-submitted content, and the Translator app for having multilingual conversations on the move, among others.

More languages

Microsoft said there are plans to add more of the continent’s most widely spoken languages as part of its mission to build “meaningful cognitive products and services that improve accessibility and local engagement”.

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