TechPression

Tag: African languages

  • Apps that teach learners, African languages

    Apps that teach learners, African languages

    The need to preserve African  languages and culture post-colonisation is essential, and thoughtful entrepreneurs have developed efficient apps for this course.

    Many language-learning apps cater to more popular tongues, but there’s a rising awareness of the need to preserve and honour lesser-known languages, like those spoken across Africa’s diverse and expansive continent. 

    Exploring the world of African language-learning apps, this article emphasises how important these apps are for fostering cultural understanding, linguistic diversity, and connection.

    Read also: Microsoft adds 13 new African languages to its translation service

    Some of the top apps for African languages

    Memrise

    Courses in Swahili, Yoruba, and Zulu are available on Memrise, a platform that uses an innovative method that blends memory techniques with interactive learning. Memrise enhances the learning experience by incorporating video and audio content created by native speakers. To help users remember new words, the app also has mnemonic devices.

    uTalk

    Available Languages: uTalk provides a wide range of African languages, such as Swahili, Zulu, Yoruba, Hausa, and countless more. Amusing games, quizzes, and conversational exercises are part of the app’s feature set, which is designed with the user in mind. To further aid students in understanding the subtleties of pronunciation, it also includes audio from native speakers.

    uTalk is great for people who are just starting out with a language and want to learn some basic phrases. Although it does not provide detailed language instruction or grammar explanations, it could be helpful for intermediates looking to fill gaps in their vocabulary and pronunciation.

    DuoLingo

    Courses in Swahili, Yoruba, and Zulu are available on DuoLingo, making it a great resource for anyone looking to learn these African languages. The gamified nature of DuoLingo’s language learning system makes it fun and efficient. The app includes activities involving speaking, listening, and translating to help users improve their language abilities.

    Nkenna

    You can learn African languages like Yoruba, Twi, Igbo, Swahili, and Somali on NKENNE, which helps to create a community of people who speak these languages. Prepared by world-renowned educators, these lessons are supplemented with instructional resources like games, flashcards, quizzes, and progress monitors

    Izesan

    Originally developed for the Esan language, Izesan now offers lessons in fifteen other African tongues, including Fulfulde, Xhosa, Kanuri, Tiv, Hausa, Zulu, Yoruba, and Jamaican Creole. Learn various African languages with the help of this app’s interactive lessons that include flashcards and other exercises. The ability to arrange individualised study sessions with qualified instructors is a prominent feature of the app’s private 1-on-1 lessons.

    The importance of safeguarding African languages

    The rich cultural tapestry of Africa is reflected in the more than 2,000 languages spoken there. But a lot of these languages are in danger of dying out because of things like urbanisation, globalisation, and the prevalence of colonial languages. 

    Keeping African languages alive is important for many reasons, including transmitting traditional wisdom, narratives, and values from one generation to the next and preserving cultural identity. An easy and engaging way to promote and revive African languages is through language-learning applications.

    Breaking down geographical barriers and promoting a sense of global community, language-learning apps make African languages accessible to a global audience.

    Apps like this use interactive and immersive learning techniques to help users engage with the language in a more dynamic way than with more conventional approaches.

    Mutual Appreciation: The two are inseparable; one cannot exist without the other. Users gain a deeper understanding of the rich histories, diverse traditions, and cultural practices linked to African lanages as they learn them through these apps.

    Users aid in the survival of languages in danger of extinction by studying and using African languages, which are themselves in danger of extinction.

    The proliferation of language-learning apps is a direct result of the exponential growth in the capacity of modern technology to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and appreciation. 

    The availability of language-specific applications on the African continent helps spread the word about the continent’s rich linguistic history while also making it easier for people to learn new languages. The rich history and varied cultures of Africa are preserved in the many languages spoken by its people, and these apps can help users discover more about them.

  • Microsoft adds 13 new African languages to its translation service

    Microsoft adds 13 new African languages to its translation service

    Microsoft has introduced 13 additional African languages to its Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator, enabling for translation of text and documents to and from these languages throughout the full Microsoft ecosystem.

    The Microsoft Translator software enables you to have captioned, real-time translations of conversations, interpret menus and street signs offline and translate web pages and app content with a single touch. This new addition is a part of the company’s ongoing mission to provide people who speak African languages the resources they require to thrive.

    The most recent African languages to be supported after the introduction of Somali and Zulu last year are chiShona, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Xhosa, and Yoruba. This increases the total number of supported languages to 124, making it possible to communicate with millions more people in Africa and elsewhere.

    Read also: Microsoft releases sign language functionality

    Wael Elkabbany, General Manager of Microsoft Africa Regional Cluster, said, “It is revolutionary when we can equip people across the continent to accomplish and achieve more, and it is even more revolutionary when they can do it in their own language. With this release, we continue to develop significant cognitive products and services that increase accessibility and break down the language barrier between people and cultures all around the globe.”

    “The inclusion of additional African languages allows more individuals and companies to communicate across languages and implies that language will become a seamless component of utilizing technology,” he added.

    “We are able to do this by enlisting the aid of partners in language communities that can assist in the collection of data for specific languages and that have access to human-translated texts, which is essential for overcoming the challenge of obtaining sufficient bilingual data to train and produce a machine translation model. Elkabbany continues. This network of partners helps gather multilingual data, engage with community members, and assess the quality of the resultant machine translation models.”

    How Microsoft translation service works 

    Microsoft’s Translator applications, Office and Translator for Bing, now provide translation from and to these 13 additional African languages. You can incorporate text translation from African languages into your apps, websites, workflows, and tools with the help of Microsoft Azure’s Translator Cognitive Service; you can also use Translator’s Document Translation feature to translate entire documents or large volumes of documents from one file format to another while preserving their formatting with Translator. To include features like speech-to-text and picture translation into your applications, you may utilize a Translator in conjunction with other Cognitive Services like Speech or Computer Vision.

    OpenAI, Microsoft to challenge Google with ChatGPT-powered Bing

    Leveraging cutting-edge neural machine translation (NMT) technology, Microsoft has steadily expanded the number of languages and dialects supported by its Translator service. Microsoft Research pioneered the development of machine translation systems more than a decade ago; the company has since refined and enhanced these systems and techniques, including the adoption of NMT technology as Artificial Intelligence (AI) has progressed and the migration of all machine translation systems to neural models to enhance translation fluency and accuracy.

    These enhancing capacities allow organizations to broaden their worldwide reach by facilitating multilingual customer service and app development, as well as facilitating localization of content and applications in a timely, dependable, and cost-effective manner.

    As part of Microsoft’s objective to provide meaningful cognitive products and services that promote accessibility and local engagement, the company aims to include more of the continent’s most commonly spoken languages.