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Microsoft has added Shona and other 12 African languages to its Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator, allowing text and documents to be translated to and from Shona across the entire Microsoft ecosystem of products and services.
Following the release of Somali and Zulu last year, the other languages to be supported are Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho, Setswana, Xhosa, and Yoruba.
According to Microsoft, “This brings the total number of supported languages to 124, adding language support for millions of people in Africa and around the world.
“This release highlights our mission to build meaningful cognitive products and services that improve accessibility and empower local communities. As the benefits and value of translation support become more evident, particularly for African languages, we will see it help break down language barriers and enable more people to connect with each other and technology in a way that empowers them to do and achieve more,”Microsoft added.
The company explains that the translation works across:
- Microsoft 365 for translating text and documents,
- Microsoft Edge browser and Bing search engine for translating whole webpages,
- SwiftKey for translating messages,
- LinkedIn for translating user-submitted content,
- The Translator app for having multilingual conversations on the move, among others.
“There are plans to add more of the continent’s most widely spoken languages as part of Microsoft’s mission to build meaningful cognitive products and services that improve accessibility and local engagement,”said Microsoft
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