Google Translate Offline Support now Embrace 9 new African Languages
Google recently announced the addition of 33 new languages, including nine African languages, to the Google Translate app for iOS and Android.
This brings Google’s total number of African languages supported to 12.
Since 2018, when Google Translate offline translation tool was launched, Arabic, Swahili, and Afrikaans have been supported.
Nigerian dialects The newly added languages include Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, as well as southern African languages Sesotho, Xhosa, Zulu, and Shona.
Kinyarwanda, which is spoken in Rwanda and other parts of East Africa, and Chichewa, which is spoken in Malawi and Zambia, will also reach a wider audience across the continent.
The offline feature, according to Google, “allows users to download languages of interest and translate text when an internet connection is unavailable.”
As a result, the additional languages aim to broaden the feature’s usage, with the overall goal of increasing multicultural inclusivity and appealing to a larger audience.
The offering will also increase global recognition and acceptance of African languages, as well as their potential use.
Yoruba and Igbo are already spoken by nearly 50 million people, according to Ofer Tirosh, a language and machine translation expert.
‘African Languages: A detailed look into the languages of Africa,’ a 2021 research article, says. Tirosh examines the role of translation in the globalization of business.
For example, on Meta platforms, Meta’s No Language Left Behind, NLLB, an open-source AI functionality, can translate internet content into approximately 60 African languages.
Meta’s Instagram Lite also supports Swahili, Amharic, and Oromo, three of East Africa’s most widely spoken languages.
Africa has a diverse linguistic landscape, with an estimated 1,500 to 2,500 living languages and major and minor languages.
Hausa, for example, is a major African language spoken by approximately 75 million people, with over 25 million people speaking Hausa as their first language.
