Microsoft has introduced 13 additional African languages to its Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator, enabling for translation of text and documents to and from these languages throughout the full Microsoft ecosystem.
The Microsoft Translator software enables you to have captioned, real-time translations of conversations, interpret menus and street signs offline and translate web pages and app content with a single touch. This new addition is a part of the company’s ongoing mission to provide people who speak African languages the resources they require to thrive.
The most recent African languages to be supported after the introduction of Somali and Zulu last year are chiShona, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Xhosa, and Yoruba. This increases the total number of supported languages to 124, making it possible to communicate with millions more people in Africa and elsewhere.
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Wael Elkabbany, General Manager of Microsoft Africa Regional Cluster, said, “It is revolutionary when we can equip people across the continent to accomplish and achieve more, and it is even more revolutionary when they can do it in their own language. With this release, we continue to develop significant cognitive products and services that increase accessibility and break down the language barrier between people and cultures all around the globe.”
“The inclusion of additional African languages allows more individuals and companies to communicate across languages and implies that language will become a seamless component of utilizing technology,” he added.
“We are able to do this by enlisting the aid of partners in language communities that can assist in the collection of data for specific languages and that have access to human-translated texts, which is essential for overcoming the challenge of obtaining sufficient bilingual data to train and produce a machine translation model. Elkabbany continues. This network of partners helps gather multilingual data, engage with community members, and assess the quality of the resultant machine translation models.”
How Microsoft translation service works
Microsoft’s Translator applications, Office and Translator for Bing, now provide translation from and to these 13 additional African languages. You can incorporate text translation from African languages into your apps, websites, workflows, and tools with the help of Microsoft Azure’s Translator Cognitive Service; you can also use Translator’s Document Translation feature to translate entire documents or large volumes of documents from one file format to another while preserving their formatting with Translator. To include features like speech-to-text and picture translation into your applications, you may utilize a Translator in conjunction with other Cognitive Services like Speech or Computer Vision.
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Leveraging cutting-edge neural machine translation (NMT) technology, Microsoft has steadily expanded the number of languages and dialects supported by its Translator service. Microsoft Research pioneered the development of machine translation systems more than a decade ago; the company has since refined and enhanced these systems and techniques, including the adoption of NMT technology as Artificial Intelligence (AI) has progressed and the migration of all machine translation systems to neural models to enhance translation fluency and accuracy.
These enhancing capacities allow organizations to broaden their worldwide reach by facilitating multilingual customer service and app development, as well as facilitating localization of content and applications in a timely, dependable, and cost-effective manner.
As part of Microsoft’s objective to provide meaningful cognitive products and services that promote accessibility and local engagement, the company aims to include more of the continent’s most commonly spoken languages.