#Translateq software#

Even at the prestigious university she attended, she said, “people would look at me weird.”īut she found a group of native Quechua speakers who not only liked to speak Quechua, but liked to speak it loudly, as she did.

Yeni Erazo, 24, a health administrator in Lima, said that while her family raised her to take pride in speaking Quechua, she was bullied for speaking it at elementary school. He said there was a growing movement in the Quechua-speaking community in recent years that has embraced the language and fought stereotypes that portray the language as a relic of the past or a cultural curiosity.

#Translateq software#

Alvarez Ccoscco, the activist.īut she and other Quechua language activists have been busy digitizing dictionaries, adapting open-source software to Quechua, writing Quechua-language blogs and e-magazines, and offering up Quechua versions of everything from colonial screeds and short stories to video games. “There are many places that don’t know of us yet.”Ī little over a decade ago, Quechua was barely on the internet, said Ms. “People are celebrating,” said Maryk Francq Mavie Amonga, a production assistant for the multilingual news service Africanews and a native speaker of Lingala. European languages like Swedish, Finnish or Catalan with much smaller numbers of native speakers have been on the translation tool for years, mainly because they have been overrepresented in online text, Mr. Lingala, a Central African language, was also just added to Google Translate, though it is spoken by some 45 million people.

“As more communities come online, it’s more possible to do this sort of thing,” Mr. Underrepresented languages like Quechua have a growing online presence and so Google’s translation model learned the language by culling the public web for text written in that language.