Google is betting on African languages, including Dyura, Wolof, Bauru and Tamazight

A Google translation demo in San Francisco, California, on October 4, 2017. Elijah Nouvelage/AFP

“He who declares war does not take part in it.” This Baul proverb can now be translated by Google Translate: “He who declares war does not take part in it.”

Since a new update on June 27, the American giant's software can now translate 110 new languages, including Breton and Occitan, as well as 31 African languages, including Tamazight (a Berber language), Afar, Wolof, Dura and Bauru, which Google says are spoken by 200 million people on the continent.

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“Now, you can take a photo of a label in Chinese and see it translated into Dura in Google Lens,” said Abdoulai Diack, program manager at Google's artificial intelligence lab in Accra, Ghana, adding that the new service “brings the community together.”

Establishing this translation model was a big challenge, given the lack of available resources. Half of the content on the internet is in English; only 3% in French, and less than 1% in many African languages. “There are blogs and news sites in Swahili, Hausa, and Wolof, but many African languages ​​are primarily spoken orally,” Diack explains. “So our first challenge was to identify what written resources were available.” In addition to these sites, several key texts, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Bible, and the Quran, have been translated into nearly every language on the planet.

“Incentive effect”

The Google team then worked with linguists from multiple faculties, including the University of Ghana, and NGOs to build up data on all the languages ​​they covered. These components were used to train Google's AI learning model, called PaLM2, which has already been tested on nearly 400 languages. “Artificial intelligence is like a child,” Diack summed up. “The more data the model receives, the more it learns and the better it does.”

Google's partners in target communities, including endangered language groups and researchers, were asked to evaluate the initial AI translations and improve them until they reached a high enough quality and quantity to release an update. “This process will take several years. The result won't be perfect, but it's satisfactory enough to be usable,” Diack explained. “There will inevitably be mistakes, but it will be useful to many people.”

That view is echoed by Ivorian linguist Jurmi N'Guessane Kouadio, co-author of a French-Bauru dictionary and whom Le Monde asked to test the latest version of Google Translate. “Bauru is inseparable from oral tradition,” he says. “To improve the translation, for example, you need to be able to translate tones, that is, phonemes that change the meaning of a word. Tones are indicated by diacritics under the syllable. Take for example the letter 'sa', which, when pronounced with a high tone, means 'hand', but when pronounced with a low tone, means 'like this'. All Ivorian languages ​​work that way, including Dura.”

Nguessan Kouadio acknowledged that despite his concerns, the software “has its uses.” “For years, people have been trying to convince Africans and Ivorians that they can speak and write in their own language, not just French or English,” he said. “I think software like this can have an inspiring effect, especially for young people in the diaspora who are no longer with their native language.”

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Specialized uses are also on the cards: the African languages ​​added so far (five in 2020, ten in 2022, including Bambara, Lingala and Twi) are available as open source through application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect to Google programs and services. The software could also make the work of human interpreters easier, predicts Yao Kanga Tano from Côte d'Ivoire, whose main translation requests involve official documents. “Of course, the results need to be corrected, but machine translation saves a lot of time.”

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The Silicon Valley giant doesn't intend to stop there. Its mid-term goal is to integrate 1000 languages, with prioritization determined according to several criteria: the number of speakers, the feasibility of the project in terms of the abundance of written resources, and the desires of the communities involved. “They have been asking for Wolof for years,” Diack said. His team plans to develop speech recognition and synthesis systems for the recently added languages, similar to those already present for older languages. The technology will allow the phone to instantly repeat French sentences in Bauru, a particularly useful option for speakers who cannot read or write.

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Google also claims to want to preserve endangered languages ​​that are little used by younger generations, such as N'Ko, invented in 1949 by Guinean writer Solomana Kanto, whose unique alphabet was designed to empower the Mandingo community by giving them their own writing system.

Marine Janine (Abidjan, correspondence)

This is a translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr. The publisher is solely responsible for the French version.

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