Young Halabjai man adds Sorani Kurdish dialect to Google Translate

A young man from Halabja worked for 7 years to add the Sorani Kurdish dialect to the Google Translate service.

Bokan Hassan was born in 1991 in Halabja. For 7 years, he collected and used more than one and a half million pieces of data to add the Sorani Kurdish dialect to the translator.

"The struggles and sacrifices of the Kurdish nation helped us convince the company to add the language," he said.

The Slemani Governorate administration congratulated and thanked Hassan for his achievement, saying that what has helped in preserving the Kurdish nation is their language. 

In a post on Facebook, the Consulate General of the United States also congratulated Hassan and speakers of the dialect.

"Google just announced adding the Sorani Dialect of the Kurdish language to Google Translate. We warmly congratulate the speakers of the Sorani Dialect and the wider community in IKR and around the world on this special occasion," the consulate said.

"We’d also like to especially congratulate Bokan Jaff, a young man from Halabja and one of the key collaborators on this project, for his dedication and hard work in bringing about this important milestone for the Kurdish language on the world stage," it added. "In his March visit to Halabja, CG Palladino met Bokan, and he briefed the CG on his efforts, this event at Google, and expressed his gratitude to the U.S. Consulate General in Erbil for helping him connect with engineers at Google Translate. And well done to the other hard-working collaborators who worked on the project! What’s the first thing you will try to have Google Translate translate to/from Kurdish for you?" 

There are two main Kurdish dialects (Kurmanji and Sorani), as well as some peripheral ones (e.g. Pahlewani, Zazaki, and Hewrami /Gorani). 



PUKmedia