Google Translate now uses machine learning for Zulu and Xhosa

Google said it now has neural translation support for Zulu and Xhosa.

The development will allow translations to be closer to spoken language, it said.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who heads up a machine intelligence division at Google, said previous translations were based on programming an understanding of the grammar of a language into the translator.

With neural translation, the service learns the language from hundreds of thousands of examples and builds a “concept space” – an intermediary language the software uses to translate phrases from one language to another.

Neural translation for Zulu, Xhosa, and Swahili is available on Google Translate.

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