Microsoft Translator launches Zulu as next African language to be translated

Microsoft has added Zulu to its Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator, enabling text and documents to be translated to and from one of South Africa’s official languages across the entire Microsoft ecosystem of products and services.

Zulu joins Swahili as the latest African language to be supported. 

Microsoft  said there are plans to add more of the continent’s most widely spoken languages as part of the company’s mission to build meaningful cognitive products and services that improve accessibility and local engagement.

Siya Madyibi,  Executive Director: Corporate, External and Legal Affairs at Microsoft South Africa said the support which has been added for over 100 languages and dialects worldwide means that more people are able to connect and that language will become a seamless feature of using technology. 

“Translator aims to break the language barrier between people and cultures all over the world. To achieve this, we have continuously added languages and dialects to this service while ensuring the translation quality of the supported languages by using the latest neural machine translation (NMT) techniques.” 

The company, through its Microsoft Research unit, first developed machine translation systems more than a decade ago – and has consistently built on and improved these systems and techniques, adopting NMT technology as Artificial Intelligence (AI) evolved and migrating all machine translation systems to neural models to improve translation fluency and accuracy.

Madyibi said as the benefits and value of translation support become more evident, particularly for African languages, there are  capabilities being rolled out for more of the continent’s languages – ultimately helping break down language barriers and helping more people connect with each other and technology in a way that empowers them to do and achieve more.