On The South African ‘s Facebook page, Andrew Sinclair said the Afrikaans service is developing, despite it being â€œquite dodgy” at the beginning. If made permanent, the quality of the Zulu service could improve with time, much like its Afrikaans counterpart. This is why translation accuracy will sometimes vary across languages,” it said. “The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyse in a specific language, the better the translation quality will be. Google explains on its website that not all translations are perfect as they are generated by machines. Â€œOnly a few words are translated accurately, and none of the sentences is intelligible,” he added. Â€œThe Hausa translation … is wonky, believe me,” explained Habeeb Pindiga, deputy editor of the Nigerian publication The Daily Trust Newspaper. Some of the other trial African languages have also been criticised by some volunteers on the Google Africa website. The subject morpheme ‘u-‘, must always qualify the subject noun,” he explained. Â€œThe version of Zulu Google Translate goes ‘Lucas shayela moto’, which if translated back to English is ‘Lucas drive car’. The correct translation is ‘uLucas ushayela imoto’. Â€œTake for an example the following sentence,” explained Mabilane, â€œ’Lucas is driving a car’.

Mabilane explained that the verbs in the English-to-Zulu translations are missing the subject morphemes used when they follow a noun. It appears to me as if someone merely programmed Zulu terms straight from the dictionary without due consideration of the grammar rules of the language.” He said, â€œI find the translation very poor. He tested the new service for The South African.

Johannesburg-based Nicholous Mabilane, a candidate attorney at Webber Wentzel co-majored in Zulu at the University of Johannesburg. Despite many celebrating the initiative, some people have highlighted problems with the service.

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