With over 71 languages translated and already in use, Google Translate wants to add Africa’s Hausa, Igbo, Somali, Yoruba and Zulu on the list in a bid to make information universally accessible and useful, regardless of the language in which it’s written.
Google said, “Hello Africa, We need your help with evaluating translation quality for some of our “promising” African languagesHAUSA, IGBO, SOMALI, YORUBA and ZULU.”
“We need speakers of these languages to help rate our current machine translation system.
Thanks and happy translating,” the firm added.
For Google Translate to generate a translation, it detects patterns in hundreds of millions of documents already translated by human translators. It then makes intelligent guesses as to what would be an appropriate translation via “statistical machine translation”. Since the translations are machine-generated, they are not so perfect. Google Translate therefore looks for human translators to refine documents so as Google Translate can analyse in a specific language for a better translation quality.