Microsoft has added 13 new African languages to its Azure Cognitive Services Translator, bringing the total number of supported languages to 124.
With the new additions of chiShona, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Xhosa, and Yoruba, millions of people in Africa and around the world can now access language support on Microsoft’s products and services.
This is good news for many Africans who can now communicate and access information in their native languages. According to Wael Elkabbany, General Manager, Microsoft Africa Regional Cluster, “it is transformative when we can empower our communities across the continent to do and achieve more, and even more so when they can do it in their own language.”
The new languages are integrated into Microsoft’s ecosystem, including Microsoft 365 for translating text and documents, the Microsoft Edge browser and Bing search engine for translating webpages, SwiftKey for translating messages, LinkedIn for translating user-submitted content, and the Translator app for having multilingual conversations on the move, among others. This integration means that language is now a seamless feature of using Microsoft’s technology.
Organizations can add African languages’ text translation to apps, websites, workflows, and tools using Translator, or use Translator’s Document Translation feature to translate entire documents, or volumes of documents, in a variety of different file formats while preserving their original formatting. Educators can create a more inclusive classroom for both students and parents with live captioning and cross-language understanding.
Microsoft has continuously added languages and dialects to its Translator service while ensuring the quality of the supported languages by using the latest neural machine translation (NMT) techniques. The company, through its Microsoft Research unit, first developed machine translation systems more than a decade ago – and has consistently built on and improved these systems and techniques, adopting NMT technology as Artificial Intelligence (AI) evolved and migrating all machine translation systems to neural models to improve translation fluency and accuracy.
Microsoft works with partners in language communities who can help gather data for specific languages and have access to human-translated texts, making it possible to overcome the challenge of obtaining enough bilingual data to train and produce a machine translation model. This network of partners helps collect bilingual data, consult with community members, and evaluate the quality of the resulting machine translation models.
These ever-improving capabilities make it possible for businesses to expand their global reach, enabling them to communicate with customers and partners across languages and localize content and apps quickly, reliably, and affordably. Microsoft has 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.
