Microsoft has added isiZulu to its Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator, which allows text and documents to be translated to and from South Africa’s most commonly spoken official language. This means that text and documents can be translated across the Microsoft ecosystem of products and services.
The Goal Behind Microsoft New Push
As part of Microsoft’s goal to make its products and services easier to use and more accessible to people around the world, isiZulu has become the second African language to be supported. In the future, more of the continent’s most popular languages will be added.
Microsoft’s Ecosystem Now Supports isiZulu Translation.
Microsoft 365 for translating text and documents, the Microsoft Edge browser and Bing search engine for translating entire webpages, SwiftKey for translating messages, LinkedIn for translating user-submitted content, and the Translator app for having multilingual conversations on the go are just a few examples.
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With this support—which has been enabled for over 100 languages and dialects worldwide—more people will be able to connect, and language will become a seamless feature of utilizing technology,” says Siya Madyibi, ED: Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs at Microsoft South Africa.
The Translator’s mission is to bridge the language gap between people and cultures all around the world. To do this, we have regularly added languages and dialects to this service while ensuring the translation quality of the available languages by utilizing the most recent neural machine translation (NMT) algorithms, “Madyibi said.
The company developed machine translation systems more than a decade ago through its Microsoft Research unit – and has consistently built on and improved these systems and techniques, adopting NMT technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) as it evolved and migrating all machine translation systems to neural models to improve translation fluency and accuracy.
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Working with partners in language communities who can assist in data collection for specific languages and have access to human-translated texts also aids in overcoming the difficulty of acquiring enough bilingual data to train and develop a machine translation model. This group of collaborators helps with the collection of bilingual data, consultation with community members, and the evaluation of the quality of the machine translation models they make.
Microsoft thinks that these ever-improving capabilities enable organizations to increase their worldwide reach by allowing them to connect with customers and partners in several languages and localize content and apps quickly, consistently, and economically. It also helps to remove barriers to internal communication between people from different countries.
As the benefits and value of translation support become more apparent, particularly for African languages, Madyibi says, “we will see capabilities being rolled out for more of the continent’s languages, ultimately helping to break down language barriers and helping more people connect with each other and technology in a way that empowers them to do and achieve more.”