3 African languages Xhosa, Shona, Amharic added onto Google Translate

Three African languages – Amharic, the official working language of Ethiopia, and Xhosa, the second most common native language in South Africa after Afrikaans, and Shona (Zimbabwe) have been added onto Google Translate, in its latest update.

The tool has added support for 13 more languages bringing the total number of tongues it supports to 103. Also Included in this latest update is support for Shona , Corsican, Frisian, Kyrgyz, Hawaiian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Luxembourgish, Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Sindhi and Pashto.

The addition brings to 13 the total number of African languages supported on Google Translate; Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, Zulu, Igbo, Malagasy, Afrikaans, Chichewa, Sesotho, Somali, Xhosa, Shona and Amharic.

The addition brings to 13 the total number of African languages supported on Google Translate

According to The Verge , some of the languages have a wider appeal than others — only 57,000 people are estimated to speak Gaelic in Scotland, compared to the 45 million or more in the Pashto-speaking diaspora worldwide — but altogether Google says the new additions make Translate useful to an extra 120 million people, from Asia to Africa, Europe, and Hawaii.

The update will be arriving on the machine translation tool over the coming days, and Google is calling on speakers of the newly added languages to contribute their own interpretations.