Google Translate now includes Bambara, the lingua franca of Mali and one of the most widely spoken varieties of the West African trade language of Manding.
This opens the door to the instantaneous translation of written forms of one of the most important languages of Africa, which is spoken by tens of millions under various names such as Bambara in Mali, Dioula in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, Malinké in Guinea, etc.
According to Google, the Bambara language translation engine (along with that of 23 other languages that were added at the same) was trained exclusively via monolingual Bambara text.
This is a technical innovation because it means that the software was never fed a single example of how to translate between Bambara and English (or any other language). The full details on this new technique which known as “Zero-Shot Machine Translation” are available in this Google AI Blog post and this research paper.
While a machine translation service such as Google Translate is never perfect and can’t replace a proper dictionary and actual language learning, it is an amazing tool for both speakers and learners of Bambara (and Manding, in general) and must be celebrated.
Walk-through, testing and review video
Don’t want to spend an hour testing out various sentences and wondering whether they are right or wrong? I did it for you!
The video below is a full presentation, walk-through, testing and review.
Bambara language press coverage
The addition of Bambara to Google Translate was covered in this Bambara language article from the news blog Jɛmukan.
Navigating the paths of knowledge and money in Kong, Côte d'Ivoire.