On Wednesday Meta, the giant technology company formerly known as Facebook announced that it has built and open source Artificial Intelligence model which is the first to translate into 200 different languages including 55 African languages. with state-of-the-art results.
Meta is using the modeling techniques and learnings from the project to improve and extend translations on Facebook, Instagram and Wikipedia.
AI models require a lot of data to help them learn, and there isn't a lot of human-translated training data for these languages. For example, there are over 20 million people who speak and write Luganda, but examples of this written language are extremely difficult to find on the internet.
Meta says it has worked with professional translators for each of these languages to develop a reliable benchmark that can automatically assess translation quality for many resource-poor languages. They also work with professional translators to do human ratings, which means people who speak the languages natively rate what the AI has produced.
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The tech giant adds that it wants to create more inclusive machine translation systems – ones that unlock access to the web for over 4 billion people around the world who are currently excluded because they don't speak one of the few languages available.
“It's amazing how much AI is improving all of our services. We just released an AI model that we built that can translate 200 different languages – many of which are not supported by current translation systems. We call this project No Language Left Behind, and the AI modeling techniques we use are helping to make high-quality translations into the languages spoken by billions of people around the world,” said Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, in a post on his Facebook profile.
"Africa is a continent with a very high linguistic diversity and language barriers exist in everyday life. We are pleased to announce that 55 African languages will be included in this machine translation research, making it a huge step forward for our continent.”, said Balkissa Ide Siddo, Director of Public Policy for Africa, when talking about the launch of the AI model.
