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Google Translate Now Available in 5 More African Languages

13/01/2014

The African continent might have been a little neglected by Google Translate, but with the addition of a number of new African languages, the service is now also available for any people on the African continent.

According to website HumanIpo, Google recently catered for the needs of African users by adding five new African languages to its translation service Google Translate. In June, the internet mogul added Swahili and Afrikaans to their machine translation service, which was followed by Zulu, Yoruba, Somali, Igbo and Hausa last December.

In August last year, HumanIpo already reported that Google was on the hunt for experts on several African languages to help them judge the quality of the machine translations of the Zulu, Yoruba, Somali, Igbo and Hausa languages. Here, people were asked to rate translations in order for Google to get a good overview of the text that could be used for Google’s translation memory. Of course, Google is constantly improving the quality of its machine translations and speakers of the languages can still assess existing translations.

Google’s software engineer Arne Mauser also commented on this language expansion of the translation service. In a blog post on Google Africa, he stated that the addition of the five new languages in December has been the biggest expansion of African languages for Google Translate yet.

He also pointed out that the machine translations of these languages are still a work in progress. This is why next to assessing texts, native speakers are also needed for more detailed matters.

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