Global tech giants, Microsoft, has added 13 new African languages to its Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator, which will allow text and documents to be translated to and from the languages across its entire ecosystem of products and services.
According to Wael Elkabbany, General Manager, Microsoft Africa Regional Cluster, the new languages include Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba,chiShona, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana and Xhosa.
The addition of the new African languages will bring the total number of languages in the Microsoft ecosystem to 124, after the addition of Somali and Zulu in 2022.
Elkabbany said on Tuesday the addition is part of “Microsoft’s steps toward ensuring expanded language support for millions of people in Africa and around the world.”
“It is transformative when we can empower our communities across the continent to do and achieve more, and even more so when they can do it in their own language,” he said.
“We continue to build meaningful cognitive products and services that improve accessibility and break down the language barrier between people and cultures all over the world,” he added.
“By using translator, people and organizations can add African languages’ text translation to apps, websites, workflows, and tools; or use Translator’s Document Translation feature to translate entire documents, or volumes of documents, in a variety of different file formats preserving their original formatting.”
“They can also use Translator with Cognitive Services such as Speech or Computer Vision to add additional capabilities such as speech-to-text and image translation into their apps.”
“Educators can create a more inclusive classroom for both students and parents with live captioning and cross-language understanding,” Elkabbany said.