Microsoft Translator adds Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, 10 other African languages   – Newstrends
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Microsoft Translator adds Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, 10 other African languages  

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Microsoft has added three Nigerian languages (Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba) to its Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Translator.

They are part of 10 new African languages just launched on the Microsoft Translator.

This enables text and documents to be translated to and from these languages across the entire Microsoft ecosystem of products and services.

This is coming after last year’s release of Somali and Zulu, according to a statement.

It lists the latest African languages to be supported as chiShona, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Luganda, Nyanja, Rundi, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Xhosa and Yoruba.

This brings the total number of supported languages to 124 and adds language support for millions of people in Africa and worldwide.

Ola Williams, Country Manager, Microsoft Nigeria, says, “It is so powerful to be able to access knowledge and learn in one’s own language. The addition of Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba builds on the ongoing work Microsoft is undertaking in Nigeria to empower our communities with access to content in indigenous languages. Through this release we continue to build meaningful cognitive products and services that improve accessibility and break down the language barrier between people and cultures across Nigeria and Africa.”

It also notes that integrations across Microsoft’s ecosystem include Microsoft 365 for translating text and documents, the Microsoft Edge browser and Bing search engine for translating whole webpages, SwiftKey for translating messages, LinkedIn for translating user-submitted content, and the Translator app for having multilingual conversations on the move, among others.

It also says in the statement that using Translator, people and organisations could add African languages’ text translation to apps, websites, workflows, and tools; or use Translator’s Document Translation feature to translate entire documents, or volumes of documents, in a variety of different file formats preserving their original formatting.

They can also use Translator with Cognitive Services such as Speech or Computer Vision to add additional capabilities such as speech-to-text and image translation into their apps. Educators can create a more inclusive classroom for both students and parents with live captioning and cross-language understanding.

Microsoft has continuously added languages and dialects to its Translator 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.

According to the firm, working with partners in language communities who can help gather data for specific languages and who have access to human-translated texts also helps to overcome the challenge of obtaining enough bilingual data to train and produce a machine translation model. This network of partners help collect bilingual data, consult with community members and evaluate the quality of the resulting machine translation models.

It notes that these ever-improving capabilities make it possible for businesses to expand their global reach, enabling them to communicate with customers and partners across languages and localise content and apps quickly, reliably, and affordably.

“Language should never be a barrier to using technology. With the addition of new African languages, more people and businesses will be enabled to connect across languages seamlessly,” says Williams.

It also says 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.

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PH refinery: 200 trucks will load petroleum products daily, says Presidency

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Port Harcourt Refinery

PH refinery: 200 trucks will load petroleum products daily, says Presidency

No fewer than 200 trucks are set to load petroleum products at the government-owned Port Harcourt Refinery, the presidency has said.

A presidential spokesperson, Sunday Dare, made this known in a statement through his official X handle on Tuesday.

Newstrends had reported that the Nigerian National Petroleum Company on Tuesday announced that Port Harcourt Refinery has resumed operations and crude oil processing after years of inactivity.

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Reacting, Dare said, “200 trucks are expected to load products daily from the refinery, Renewing the Hopes of Nigeria.”

He added that “the Port Harcourt refinery has two wings.

“The Old Refinery comes on stream today with an installed production capacity of 60, 000 barrels per day of crude oil.”

 

PH refinery: 200 trucks will load petroleum products daily, says Presidency

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Breaking: CBN increases interest rate to 27.50%

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Breaking: CBN increases interest rate to 27.50%

 

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has raised the lending interest to 27.50 per cent from 27.25 per cent.

This latest increase in the Monetary Policy Rate came after a meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Monday and concluded Tuesday.

The Monetary Policy Rate measures the benchmark interest rate.

The CBN Governor, Yemi Cardoso, announced this in Abuja on Tuesday after the MPC meeting, last for the year, held at the apex bank’s headquarters.

He said the MPC voted unanimously to raise the MPR by 25 basis points from 27.25% to 27.50%; and retain the Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) at 50% for Deposit Money Banks and 16% for Merchant Banks.

The CBN governor also said the MPC retained the Liquidity Ratio (LR) at 30% and Asymmetric Corridor at +500/-100 basis points around the MPR.

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Nigeria’s unemployment rate dropped to 4.3% in Q2 – NBS

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Nigeria’s unemployment rate dropped to 4.3% in Q2 – NBS

 

Nigeria’s unemployment rate stood at 4.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2024, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said in its latest report.

The report released on Monday said the unemployment rate decreased compared to the 5.3 per cent recorded in the Q1 of 2024.

The NBS defined the unemployment rate as the share of the labour force (the combination of unemployed and employed people) who are not employed but actively searching and are available for work.

“The unemployment rate for Q2 2024 was 4.3%, showing an increase of 0.1 percentage point compared to the same period last year,” the report stated.

“The unemployment rate among males was 3.4% and 5.1% among females.

“By place of residence, the unemployment rate was 5.2% in urban areas and 2.8% in rural areas. Youth unemployment rate was 6.5% in Q2 2024, showing a decrease from 8.4% in Q1 2024.”

Report also said the unemployment rate among persons with post-secondary education was 4.8 per cent; 8.5 per cent among those with upper secondary education, 5.8 per cent for those with lower secondary education, and 2.8 per cent among those with primary education in Q2 2024.

Employment rate – 76%

The report showed that the employment-to-population ratio, which measures the number of employed workers against the total working-age population, increased to 76.1 per cent in Q2 2024.

“In Q2 2024, 76.1% of Nigeria’s working-age population was employed, up from 73.1% in Q1 2024,” the report stated.

Self-employment – 85.6%

The report further showed that Nigeria’s labour market saw a notable shift as the proportion of self-employed individuals increased in Q2 2024.

It stated, “The proportion of persons in self-employment in Q2 2024 was 85.6%.”

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