Africa is a huge continent, a home for more than 1 billion people that speak 1250–3000 native languages.
Here, a digital platform called OBTranslate wants to translate more than 2,000 African languages, to enable rural dwellers to gain easy access to global markets. This is because according to its creator, 63 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to global markets because of language barriers.
“Over 52 native languages in Africa have undergone language death and have no native speakers and no spoken descendants,” said Emmanuel Gabriel, founder of Germany-based OpenBinacle, the creator of OBTranslate."
"OBTranslate can close communication gaps on the continent.”
“In the next five years, we hope to acquire thousands or millions of users to take up translation tasks on OBTranslate.”
Related: Researchers Use AI To Save Indigenous Languages From Becoming Extinct
The innovation sparked from an idea from an earlier messaging app called OBTalker, which was able to translate 26 languages However, its real-time translation led inaccurate outputs, Gabriel admitted.
“We were very frustrated about the messaging app, and as a result we didn’t want to come into the market with a bad product,” added Gabriel. “We decided to embark on building our own computer-assisted translation and machine learning platform and this gave birth to OBTranslate.”
With translation, many things are put into consideration. They include, and not limited to: speech patterns, voice recognition, accent, text recognition and so on. This is why the use of machine learning, AI and big data analysis was important in the development of OBTranslate.
With AI, the computer-assisted translation should be able to convert text into smaller and translatable segments, making it more efficient in facilitating quick and more accurate translations.
From Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Zulu, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Berber, Amharic, Oromo, Swahili, Manding, and Fulani, to thousands more languages that divide Africa’s 54 countries, Gabriel hopes to close language barriers with his AI platform.
Nigeria where Gabrel came from, has alone over 500 languages
“Our goal is to break language communication barriers in rural and urban areas in Africa and it will enable self-driving cars, smartphones, linear robots and wireless technology to communicate and interact with Africans in their dialects.”
The initial drawback for this AI-powered translation tool comes from technical issues. The team needs to enable translation by public users to get significant amount of data for the machine learning technology to learn.
"We are working hard to ensure that when people present training materials in African languages … they don’t necessarily tell the machines what to look for. The system [should] find patterns themselves such as contextual clues around the source sentence,” he explained.
To kick-start the project, OpenBinacle has already received infrastructure worth $100,000 from French cloud computing company OVH, as well as Amazon and Google. The company is exploring for ways to use the funding to refine OBTranslate.
Gabriel believes the platform could make a positive contribution to Africa’s economy and job creation efforts.
“Farmers will be able to trade their goods and services without language communication barriers," said Gabriel as an example.
