Cape Town, South Africa

Today, Afrikaans joins the list of 50+ text translation languages supported by Microsoft Translator. The language is now, or will soon be available in all of Microsoft products with Translation features powered by Microsoft Translator.

Afrikaans is spoken by over 7 million people worldwide as a primary language, with most being concentrated in western South Africa and southern Namibia. It is a derivative of Dutch which was brought to what is now South Africa in the 18^th century. Over time, it also adopted words from African Bantu and Khoisan languages and European languages such as Portuguese and German.

Afrikaans will be available in:

• Microsoft Translator apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10
• IM Translation in Skype for Windows desktop
• Microsoft Office, including Word*, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Visio, and Word Online
• Microsoft SharePoint
• Document Translator

Developers who use the Microsoft Translator text translation API now also have access to the new language in their apps and products. You can learn more about integrating the Microsoft Translator text translation API into your app on the Microsoft Translator website.

In addition to the text API, Microsoft Translator recently introduced a speech translation API which can translate speech from 8 supported languages (Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) into any of the 50+ text translation languages, now including Afrikaans.

The speech API is the world’s first end-to-end translation API that is optimized for real-life conversations rather than simple human to machine commands. Speech to text translation into Afrikaans could be used for solutions such as real-time presentation translation, customer support or media subtitling.

Learn More:

• Getting Started with Microsoft Translator
• Microsoft Translator Apps
• How does automatic translation work?

*To activate Afrikaans as a text translation language in Word, take the following steps:

1. Click on “review” then “translate” and “translate selected text”. (Note: do not try with the mini-translator or document options as the update menu is not available from these options.)
2. In the research pane, click on “get updates to your services” located at the bottom of the research pane
3. Follow the various pop-up windows prompts:
   • Update
   • Continue
   • Install
   • OK
4. Afrikaans text translation will now be available as a translation language. To learn more about using Translator in Microsoft Word, check out this instructional video on YouTube.