Masakhane Web: A Machine Translation Platform for African Languages

Abstract

Low-resource languages pose a particularly difficult challenge to neu-ral machine translation (NMT), and there appears to be insufficient machine translation (MT) systems to support African language accessibility. Masakhane Web, an NMT system for African languages, is proposed in this paper. Our approach is an open-source platform that is free, flexible, and produces reasonably accurate translations for African languages. The platform makes use of Masakhane community-trained MT models. It enables users to generate new data by providing feedback on translations, which is then used to retrain the models to improve them. Ultimately, our goal is to create a platform that can provide accurate translations for African languages and make the process of creating MT models easier for those who lack the technical expertise. Furthermore, we include strategies for domain experts to evaluate the system and explain how the platform can be used as a data collection source to improve MT for African languages.