Luganda added to Google Translate with 9 other African languages

The list below shows the new additions to the language facility on the tech giant:

Bambara – spoken in Mali
Ewe – spoken in Ghana and Togo
Krio – spoken in Sierra Leone
Lingala – spoken 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

Several other African languages were already available, including Swahili, Amharic, Hausa and Somali.

The language software has in the past been translating documents to Luganda while learning and improving as more Luganda material was uploaded. Google says that these new additions rely on novel software which does not require reference to previous examples.

Google Translate’s research scientist Isaac Caswell told the BBC that this work was part of “expanding coverage to many communities who were very much overlooked not just by Google but other technologies in general”.

Concerning whether or not the translations will be accurate with this new software, Caswell says the journey to accuracy is still long.

“For many supported languages, even the largest languages in Africa that we have supported – say like Yoruba, Igbo, the translation is not great. It will definitely get the idea across but often it will loss much of the subtlety of the language,” Mr Caswell admitted.

With the new languages, he said, it would be no different. But the people who helped in the research said it was a good place to start.