African languages included in Google Translate

"At Google we believe that the Internet is about enabling access to the world's information, all of the world's information, in all of its languages. Google Translate makes it easier to access web content from all over the web, even when it was written in language not your own," says Tom Stocky, the company's director of product management.

Now Afrikaans-speaking users can find and view search results on foreign language web pages in their own language. They can translate specific web pages or text, as well as search English web pages using Afrikaans keywords and have the results translated from any of 51 other languages into Afrikaans.

How translated search works; type in your query and select the language in which you would like to see your results. Google translates the query, searches across the web and translates the title and snippets of the results.

For example, you are an Afrikaans internet user planning a trip to Europe. You could receive web results about European tour companies in English, French or another language, translated back into Afrikaans for you in a snippet like this docs.google.com/a/google.com/File?id=dck85zhv_22d5mfhfgb_b.

Feedback invited

Users can also paste text or a URL for a particular webpage in any of the 51 supported languages and receive a translation in Afrikaans via Google Translate.

"Google Translate is a great tool for people around the world who want to search and get results in their own language," said Stephen Newton for Google South Africa. "Machine translation is a complex challenge but Google recognises the rich diversity of languages in Africa, and the introduction of Swahili and Afrikaans is one step in our ongoing strategy to develop products tailored to Africa, so we can best serve all users across all countries and communities."

Machine translation isn't perfect, but it's a tool for anyone looking to access and get an overview of information in languages he or she doesn't know well. In addition, Google also provides users the ability to suggest a better translation if they encounter a translation that is awkward or not quite right. Google uses this feedback to help improve translation quality in future updates to the system.

Check out Google Translate at translate.google.co.za/.