The multilingual neural machine translation service, Google Translate, has expanded its offline translation language content by adding 9 African languages and 25 non-African languages to its App on iOS and Android.
Now, Google Translate has covered 12 African languages in its offline translation tool.
In 2018, Swahili and Afrikaans were added to the Google Translate offline translation tool; now, at the dawn of 2023, major Nigerian languages (Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba) have just been added.
Also, major languages spoken by Southern African like Sesotho, Xhosa, Zulu and Shona, as well as Kinyarwanda commonly spoken by some Eastern African countries like Rwanda, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi. The Chichewa spoken by parts of East, Central and Southern Africa, which covers Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe lingual sphere.
With the expansion of Google’s offline lingual capacity, it plans to reach a larger audience across Africa. According to the tech company, the offline feature enables users to “download the languages of interest and translate text when an internet connection is unavailable.”
The new languages would expand the usage of the translation tool, creating a sense of acceptance and global recognition for the African language as it also boosts the inclusion of lingual and cultural diversity.
In a statement by Ofer Tirosh, a language and machine translation expert, “Globalisation is key in order to obtain business success…translation serves to eliminate language barriers that limited globalisation.” Moreover, he added that the inclusion of African languages in offline translation features makes the existing online translation feature more valuable for African languages.
Also, the Google keyboard (Gboard) is designed to support up to 200 African languages with artificial intelligence to personalise commands and accents of different languages.
The language barrier is eroding as Google Translate helps integrate African languages into its technological upgrades. While the language-translation tool is an innovative feature, will there ever be a future technology that would interpret spoken language to other languages over cell phones?
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Photo By Google Translate
