Smartphone app for translation from English to Luganda, Swahili, Langi..

Mr Awici's app which is free to users, hoping to grow user numbers and earn from Google adverts. PHOTO BY RACHEAL AJWANG

What you need to know:

Safarini Translator works with Android and iPhone and, the app developer Ambrose Awici hopes, will soon be available to those using Windows phones. He also hopes to add other East African languages in due course.

The Baganda call it ente enkazi; it is called ng’ombe in Swahili; dyang in Lango; and ng’ombe or makia in Kikuyu.

All these options are just a few taps away on your smart phone if you want to know how a cow is called in those four East African languages, courtesy of a new mobile phone app developed by a Ugandan based in Norway. The app is called Safarini Translator.

On a phone powered by Android, one only needs to log on to Play Store and download the app. With moderate Internet speed, it should take at most five minutes to download. The app is 4.3mb.

“Cow” is just one of the 8,000 words that the app translates to the four languages. But, as the app developer, Mr Ambrose Awici, admits, the app is still very much a work in progress.

This is the case partly because the English language is very broad and keeps growing, adopting words all the time. According to the Global Language Monitor, there were an estimated 1,025,109 words in the English language as of January 1, 2014.

Cardinal objective
So whereas Mr Awici intends to keep adding new words to the app, his cardinal objective is to capture the most important words in order to facilitate functional use of the languages involved and not necessarily to create language experts.

Having studied computer engineering at Kyambogo University, Mr Awici moved to Norway eight years ago, where he did a two-year course in 3D Animation.

He has since married and settled there and hopes to be elected full councillor later this year. He is currently deputy councillor in a locality just outside Oslo.

Married to a non-Ugandan, Mr Awici knows a bit about the need for one’s partner to be able to easily look up words in their partner’s language. “It can help you surprise your partner in a good way,” he says.

He hopes that the app will also help children of East Africans who live in the Diaspora to learn their mother tongues, in addition to tourists, expatriates and other foreigners who for some reason or other may take interest in East African languages.

“The children in the Diaspora need this app because if you don’t bring them the language on the phone or tablet, they won’t look for a book (to learn it),” Mr Awici says, “After all, books are phasing out.”

Safarini Translator works with Android and iPhone and, Mr Awici hopes, will soon be available to those using Windows phones. He also hopes to add other East African languages in due course, subject to the project being able to make money.

Mr Awici started out with what he thought were the 5,000 most commonly used words in the English language, but the number of words rose to more than 8,000 when the different tenses of some of the original 5,000 words were catered for.

He worked with translators of the different languages and used dictionaries where they were available, like in the case of Kikuyu, to come up with translations which were as close as possible to the English word in question. For the case of the Langi, he got help from the Lango Language Board.

The economics
The only hitch, he says, is financing. Mr Awici recently started an IT company, Neshorn Technologies AS, under which he has developed the app. He has to pool his own resources to finance the development of the app, he says, with the help of friends.

He toyed with the idea of making users pay for the app but dropped it, fearing that the project would not make money that way.

He then considered partnering with mobile phone companies in East Africa but again dropped the idea before tabling it to any of the companies. He feared that he would not get a good deal anywhere.

So Mr Awici decided to make the app free to users, hoping to grow user numbers and earn from Google adverts. But even if that were to fail, Mr Awici says, he will still be able to extract benefit out of the project.

“This is my first big project so it is useful for me to convince other people that I can do things,” he says, “You know in Norway you don’t just tell people that you can do something and they give you a contract, you have to show them what you have done.”

Early excitement
And as Mr Awici ponders on how to recoup his investment, he will most likely wish to meet up with 16-year-old Janet Namusoke, who is already excited by the app.

Namusoke, who has a Zimbabwean mother and Ugandan father, goes to an international school in Kampala and she hardly gets to speak Luganda and other local languages.

“Even Google Translate does not cater for Luganda and Shona,” she says, “I hope this app would expand to cover Shona.” Shona is the native language of Namusoke’s mother.

Mr Awici’s plan is to capture only East African languages, he says, so Namusoke’s dream may not be fully served. Her example, however, shows that there are probably a number of people even within Uganda who will find the app handy.