2024-07-22 22:04:48
Since June 27, Google Translate has integrated 110 new languages, including about 30 African languages, among which Wolof. In Senegal, the community working on translation AI is watching this development with enthusiasm, while startups that are already developing similar tools are looking to position themselves to face the competition.
Wolof’s Arrival Google Translation can make life easier for many Senegalese people. Both in their daily lives and in their economic activities. ” Some people only know Wolof and only know how to read and write in Wolof. Here, justice is done in French, so people who are not fluent in French can benefit from translation of administrative procedures. Traders and tourists will also be able to communicate more easily. »,Mouhamadane Mboup, data analytics engineer, explains.
Wolof data is scarce
Mouhamadane is part of a community of researchers specializing in artificial intelligence. SenegalGarson AI. It’s also good news for him and his colleagues, as they will have access to an additional database to do their work. ” Wolof, like most African languages, is a low-resource language. Training data and translation systems are scarce. Derguene Mbaye, co-founder of GalsenAI, continued. If tomorrow we want to run an experiment on a task for which we have no data in Wolof, we can get that data in another language, translate it, and run the experiment. »
Tech startup competition
But the arrival of the Google giant also puts the Senegalese tech startup ecosystem in competition, which is already working on Wolof translation. Baamtu has been working on its translation tool Tekkilma for six years. They hope to differentiate themselves from Google by offering a more professional service. Derguene Mbaye is also a research engineer at Baamtu: We do intend to find niches that Google cannot address in translation in specific areas such as professional or legal fields. There are also issues related to speech. We know that African languages are mainly “spoken”, so we have been working on the development of speech tools such as speech synthesis or speech recognition for many years. These will be additional capital gains. »
Baamtu works with Senegalese ministries and banks, and being a local company allows them to stand out.” We understand the market and context very well. This will reassure clients that the company is nearby and not a giant far away from their concerns. », explains Tanor Dieng, Product Director.
Mouhamadane Mboup raised one final risk: the standardization of the Wolof language on Google to better fit its translation model.
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