Google LLC has announced that it has added Luganda, and 23 more languages to its latest changes on Google Translate, a feature that helps internet users translate words from one language to another.
Luganda is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region and is one of the major languages in Uganda spoken by more than 15 million natives of the East African country.
Although Luganda is accustomed to mainly Baganda people, several other tribes in the country have often found themselves adapting to use the language as a medium of communication in the country.
Adding Luganda to the Google Translate feature will help native speakers and linguists to help refine the translations.
The new African languages added are:
- Bambara – spoken in Mali
- Ewe – spoken in Ghana and Togo
- Krio – spoken in Sierra Leone
- Lingala – spoken in large parts of central Africa including the Democratic Republic of Congo
- Luganda – spoken in Uganda and Rwanda
- Oromo – spoken in Ethiopia
- Sepedi – spoken in South Africa
- Tigrinya – spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia
- Tsonga – spoken in South Africa
- Twi – spoken in Ghana
According to the developers, the new languages aren’t the world’s most common languages, but some are used by millions of people across the globe.
These new languages are the first the company has added to the service using its Zero-Shot Machine Translation technology.
The Zero-Shot Machine TT is a machine learning model that can learn to translate words into another language without having to see any examples.
THe company has however not shared details yet on how this works, but it’s a technology the company has been talking about since 2016.
About Google Translate
Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another.
The feature offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications
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