Google is working to add Somali, Zulu, Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo to Google Translate

Google is working to add Somali, Zulu, Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo to its existing language options in Google Translate at the moment.

A post published to the Google Africa page on Google+ is asking for volunteers to help evaluate the quality of its current machine translation system.

Google Translate supports 71 different languages at the moment, but Google now hopes to add some of its most “promising” African languages by leveraging the expertise of the Google+ community.

Users can rate passages translated into English, and vice versa. After assessing the quality of the work, volunteers can categorize it as Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, before moving on to another example.

It’s difficult to ascertain how far away Google is from actually introducing these languages to Google Translate, but it’s a clear indicator that the company is keen to expand the product and support as many users as possible in Africa.

➤ Google Translate (via Google Africa)

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