Swahili

A one-stop portal for Swahili, where you will find the Web's most popular Swahili-English dictionary, the only freely available tools to analyse Swahili, and the largest collection of references to Swahili.

Google translate is now available for Swahili

A small but functional automatic translator English to Swahili

Software-installable Swahili - English Dictionary (created by TshwaneDJe HLT), with over 16,000 entries and phrases. Integrates into Microsoft Word to display instant lookup results as you work. Other features include bilingual 'linked view', integration with Google web and image search, basic decomposition-based searching, and instant display of related cross-references. The dictionary is corpus-based, and includes hundreds of real-world usage examples.

Nordic Journal of African Studies (NJAS) is an access-free peer-reviewed journal publishing, inter alia, articles on language technology related to African languages. Since the web page contains hundreds of articles from various fields, relevant articles may be found using the page-internal search.
NJAS gets subsidy from the Nordic Committee for the Publication of Periodicals in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOP-HS).

Helsinki Corpus of Swahili contains 12,5 million words of text from a number of current news sources as well as extracts from a large number of books. Typing errors of texts have been manually corrected. The corpus was tagged with SALAMA without human intervention. With a signed contract the corpus is available for scientific research without charge.
The corpus can be accessed through the web-based browser Lemmie 2.0. A direct access to the Linux server is also possible. Currently it is not possible to access the English glosses with Lemmie 2.0. So the users needing the English glosses might wish to use the Linux interface.
Currently HCS does not have syntactic tags. In future we wish to enrich the corpus with those tags, together with a number of new features, including a large number of idioms and multi-word expressions. Also new texts will be added.

SALAMA is a rule-based system for managing a number of applications on Swahili. It includes a tokenizer, morphological analyzer, morphological disambiguator, semantic disambiguator, syntactic analyzer, and a text-based machine translation system from Swahili to English.
In morphology we have earlier used finite state methods with two-level description. Recently we have developed an alternative method using a combination of different rule types. We have used pattern matching rules for initial analysis (sufficient e.g. for a spell checker), and the accurate analysis with due ambiguity is produced with post-processing rules.
In disambiguation and syntactic mapping we have used a Constraint Grammar parser (CG2), licensed from Connexor. This parser is also used in isolating and handling multi-word expressions.
SALAMA includes also a number of rules for constituent re-ordering, and for transferring the grammatical and lexical information from Swahili into correct English language.

Google currently offers its interface in the following African languages: