Grace Ashiru
Microsoft has published its latest inclusion of 13 new African languages to its Azure Cognitive Services Translator.
Making text and document translations across the Microsoft ecosystem of products and services possible. ChiShona, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Xhosa, and Yoruba are the newest languages Microsoft included as part of its program, summing the total number of supported languages to 124.
By introducing these African languages, Microsoft is enabling more individuals and businesses to become more accessible to each other without the barrier of language as a hindrance to communication.
Microsoft Research Unit first built a machine translation system more than a decade ago and has consistently built on and upgraded these systems and techniques, adopting Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology as Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed and migrating all machine translation systems to neural model to improve translation fluency and accuracy.
The Microsoft ecosystem includes Microsoft 365 for translating text and documents, Microsoft Edge browser, Bing search engine for translating whole web pages linked in for translating user-submitted content, and a translator app for a multilingual conversation on the move.
However, the firm has consistently added languages and dialects to its translator service and made sure that the translation quality of the supported languages by using the latest NMT technique.
To surmount the challenge of putting together data for specific languages, Microsoft is expected to work with partners in the language communities so they can get enough bilingual data to train and produce machine translation models.
To amass the African languages on the translator, more words can be typed in the local languages and translations texted to apps, websites, workflows, and tools or users can utilize the Translators Document Translation Feature to translate entire documents or volumes of documents, in a variety of different file format preserving their original formatting. Thus, for additional capabilities of the translator, cognitive services such as speech or computer vision can be put to use.
Educators can create a more inclusive classroom for both students and parents with live captioning and cross-language understanding. To commensurate with Microsoft’s goal of making the global entity connected and breaching the gap of the language barrier. Microsoft still intends on adding more of the continent’s most widely spoken languages to its translator program.
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