First Fon to French Neural Machine Translation Engine launched

FIRST FON TO FRENCH Neural Machine Translation Engine launched

edAI researchers Chris Emezue and Bonaventure Dossou have launched FFRTranslate, the first Neural Machine Translation engine from Fon — a very low-resource and tonal language — to French and vice-versa.

Fon shares tonal and analytical similarities with the Niger-Congo languages which include Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, and Swahili. The engine will promote better communication in Fon and could enable companies to translate texts and messages from Fon to French and vice versa.

Dossou described working on the engine as being “an awesome ride”. “We’re thankful to everybody that supported us especially our beloved Masakhane NLP family, and the broader NLP community. We believe that this is a huge step toward empowering African endangered languages,” he said in a LinkedIn post announcing the launch.

Other contributors who worked on the project include Fabroni Yoclounon and Ricardo Ahounvlame.Read more about the translation engine in this Synapse Issue 8 article here.

Left to right: Chris Emezue, Bonaventure Dossou