Software giant Microsoft has added 13 new African languages to Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator.
Microsoft says this will allow text and documents to be translated to and from these languages across the entire ecosystem of Microsoft products and services.
Translators aim to break down language barriers between people and cultures around the world.
To achieve this, Microsoft continues to add languages and dialects to this service while ensuring the quality of supported language translations using the latest neural machine translation (NMT) techniques.
Language
13 new African languages include:
Four South African languages:
- English (Southern Sotho)
- North Sotho (Northern Sotho)
- Setswana (Tswana)
- Xhosa is South Africa’s newest official language supported.
This follows last year’s release of Zulu.
Other languages are:
- England
- Hausa
- Igbo
- Kinyarwanda
- Lingala
- England
- sea
- One more
- Yoruba
“This brings the total number of supported languages to 124 and extends language support to millions of people in Africa and around the world,” Microsoft said.
Conscience
Lillian Barnard, CEO of Microsoft South Africa, said the release highlights the company’s mission to build meaningful cognitive products and services that increase accessibility and empower local communities.
“As the benefits and value of translation support become clearer, especially for African languages, we will see how it can help overcome language barriers and allow more people to connect with each other and technology in a way that empowers them to do and achieve more many.
“The addition of new African languages means more people can connect and these languages will be a seamless feature for using technology,” Barnard said.
Integration
Integration in the Microsoft ecosystem includes Microsoft 365 to translate text and documents, the Microsoft Edge browser and the Bing search engine to translate all web pages, SwiftKey to translate messages, LinkedIn to translate user-sent content, and the Translator application to conduct multilingual conversations on the go. , among others.
Another language
Microsoft said it plans to add more of the continent’s most-used languages as part of its mission to build “meaningful cognitive products and services that improve local accessibility and engagement”.
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