Google already supports 71 languages on its popular web-based automated translation service. But now the search engine giant is looking to expand its online success story by adding several African languages into the mix.

Most of us are already quite familiar with the Google Translate, the free online automated
language translation service. The popular machine translation tool uses state-of-the-art technology and works without the intervention of human translators.

Google Translate provides instant and automatic language translations between dozens of different languages. It can translate words, sentences and web pages between any combinations of its current 71 supported languages.

“When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate can make intelligent guesses as to what an appropriate translation should be,” according to Google.

“This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called statistical machine translation. Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation will be perfect.
The more human-translated documents that Google Translate can analyze in a specific  language, the better the translation quality will be. This is why translation accuracy will sometimes vary across languages,” explained Google.

Previously, Google Translate had added Khmer, the official language of Cambodia, as the 66th language supported by the internationally popular automated language translation service.

But now Google is looking to add several African languages including Somali, Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba and Zulu to its list of language options on Google Translate.

In fact Google Africa has issued a call to action for volunteers to judge the quality of the beta African l language translations.

“Hello Africa, We need your help with evaluating translation quality for some of our “promising” African languages,” Google said in a Google+ post.

Google said that if all goes according to plan, Zulu (and by extension the other languages), could be included in the service.

“Our team is working on expanding this list and Zulu could be one of the next supported languages with your help. If you speak Zulu and English, we will greatly appreciate your help with identifying good Zulu translations,” Google explained.