Google Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service developed by Google to translate text, documents and websites from one language into another. It offers a website interface, a mobile app for Android and iOS, and an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications
At the recent annual developer conference, I/O 2022 held on 11 May 2022, Google announced that the Google translate feature will start supporting Luganda on top of other 23 new languages. Google estimates that the language is spoken by over 20 million people in Uganda and Rwanda. Google did mention that the technology isn’t perfect yet however this is a step in the right direction.
Luganda is a Bantu language spoken in the African Great Lakes region. It is one of the major languages in Uganda and is spoken by more than 10 million Baganda and other people principally in central Uganda including the capital Kampala of Uganda. For many people, it is their first language.
One of the first-ever published translations of the English language to Luganda was a tonic sofa hymnal book used by Christians in Church services. Linguistic diversity ishighly relevant to social inclusion as the languages someone speaks influence which jobs they can get, which information they can access and who they can socialize with. However, there is currently a gap in the knowledge between the sociologies of inclusion and language. Google has sought the aid of native speakers and linguists to help perfect the translations in addition to the technology.
The additional languages are not the most widely spoken languages in the world, but they are spoken by millions of people around the world, according to the creators. These are the first languages introduced to the service using the company’s Zero-Shot Machine Translation technology. This means Google can directly translate between language pairs unseen in training, and translate from one language into another language without ever seeing an example.
In addition, this addition will help in the development of Assistive Technology for Cognition (ATC) use of Luganda. ATC is theuse of technology to extend human mental capacity. Assistive technology contains a wide variety of aids, ranging from low-tech tools designed for single-task guidance to highly technical devices that compensate for cognitive impairments across environments and task domains. With this stride made by Google Translate to incorporate Luganda, we could see a leap in cognitive assistance usage at the grassroots where users will be able to communicate in Luganda aided by ATC.
Lastly, with this addition we see Google’s market development take a strategic step to develop the existing market rather than looking for a new market. Market Development is a 2-step process to tap the untapped market. It begins with market research wherein a company does a segmentation analysis and short its market segments which are worth pursuing. It is an attempt to use the existing product or service to attract new customers.
The goal is to expand the reach or tap into a different segment or unexplored market. A segment is defined as the small sub-group of a larger population. By adding new languages, Google is expanding its reach by exploring an already existing field that they currently dominate due to their platforms that consolidate many advantages like ease of access.
END
