By Phephile Motau
Microsoft Translator has increased the number of supported languages to 124 by adding 13 new African languages.
Microsoft in a statement said they had added 13 new African languages to Microsoft Translator following last year’s release of Somali and Zulu. Microsoft Translator is a cloud-based automatic translation service that can be used to build applications, websites, and tools requiring multi-language support.
The Microsoft Translator Text API can be used to translate text into any of the languages supported by the service.
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“This release highlights our continued efforts of empowering African language communities to achieve more,” the organisation said.
The languages that are now supported by Microsoft Translator are Shona with seven million speakers, Hausa spoken by 72 million people, Igbo with 40 million speakers, Kinyarwanda spoken by 10 million people, and Lingala which is used by 65 million speakers.
Others are Luganda (21 million speakers), Nyanja (1 million speakers), Rundi (12 million speakers), Sesotho (14 million speakers), Sesotho sa Leboa (15 million speakers), Setswana (13 million speakers), Xhosa (10 million speakers) and Yoruba (55 million speakers).
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The organisation said this brought the total number of supported languages to 124 and added language support for more than 335 million people in Africa and worldwide.
Microsoft Translator can be used at home, school, or work. At home, people can translate real-time conversations, menus and street signs, websites, documents, and more using the Microsoft Translator app for iOS and Android.
The organisation said at work, it can be used to globalise business and customer interactions with customizable text and document translation using Azure Cognitive Services Translator. It can also be used at school to create a more inclusive classroom for both students and parents with live captioning and cross-