• The most recent African languages to be supported are chiShona, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Xhosa, and Yoruba, after the introduction of Somali and Zulu last year.
  • The addition of Zimbabwe's language to this cutting-edge Microsoft tool that bridges cultural gaps is excellent news for Zimbabwe
  • People and organizations can use Translator to add text translation for African languages to apps

Harare-To enable text and documents to be translated into and out of these languages throughout the full Microsoft ecosystem of goods and services, Microsoft has introduced 13 new African languages to its Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator. The most recent African languages to be supported are chiShona, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Xhosa, and Yoruba, after the introduction of Somali and Zulu last year. Millions of people in Africa and throughout the world now have access to language support, bringing the total number of supported languages to 124.

The addition of Zimbabwe's language to this cutting-edge Microsoft tool that bridges cultural gaps is excellent news for Zimbabwe. The empowerment of communities across the continent to do and accomplish more is revolutionary, and it is much more powerful when they can do it in their native tongue. With this update, Microsoft is continuing to develop useful cognitive products and services that increase accessibility and reduce language barriers between people from different cultures and countries. More people and businesses will be able to communicate across languages thanks to the addition of additional African languages, and adopting technology will no longer be hindered by language barriers.

Among the Microsoft, ecosystem integrations are Microsoft 365 for translating text and documents, Microsoft Edge and Bing for translating entire webpages, SwiftKey for messaging, LinkedIn for translating user-submitted content, and the Translator app for multilingual discussions on the go.

People and organizations can use Translator to add text translation for African languages to apps, websites, workflows, and tools. They can also use the Document Translation feature to translate entire documents or large volumes of documents in a variety of file formats while maintaining the original formatting. Additionally, they can integrate Translators with cognitive services like voice or computer vision to provide their apps with new features like speech-to-text and image translation. Live captioning and cross-language comprehension can help teachers create a more welcoming learning environment for both parents and students.

By utilizing the most recent neural machine translation (NMT) strategies, Microsoft has steadily expanded the number of languages and dialects that are supported by its Translator service. Machine translation systems were first created by the company through its Microsoft Research division more than ten years ago. Since then, the company has steadily improved these systems and techniques, adopting NMT technology as Artificial Intelligence (AI) advanced, and migrating all machine translation systems to neural models to increase translation fluency and accuracy. As part of Microsoft's commitment to providing meaningful cognitive products and services that enhance accessibility and local engagement, more of the most widely spoken languages on the continent will be included.

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