Halabja-

After attempts that lasted for 7 consecutive years and with individual efforts without receiving any financial support, the 31-year-old Iraqi Bukan Hassan al-Jaf achieved his dream of adding the Sorani dialect of the Kurdish language to the Google Translate service, which is spoken by about 8 million people, most of them in Iraq. After the company announced on May 11, 24 new languages ​​were added to its engine.

After adding the 24 languages, the number of languages ​​included in the Google Translate service has become 133, and the goal - according to the company - is to enable people around the world to communicate with each other.

Al-Jaf succeeded in introducing about one million and 500 thousand statistics to the engine system (Al-Jazeera)

never give up

This helps in translating texts from Arabic, and from other living and common languages ​​into Kurdish (Sorani dialect) and vice versa in the Google Translate service, which is the official language in Iraq and the Kurdistan region, as well as in most of the Kurdish part of Iran. Which uses the Arabic-Persian letter added to it with Kurdish letters and vowels, i.e. the Sorani Kurdish alphabet.

In 2016, the Kurmanji dialect was added, which is spoken by the parts of Kurdistan in Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and North Khorasan Province in northeastern Iran, which includes the Khorasan Kurds and most of Dohuk Province in Iraq and the northern part of West Azerbaijan Province in Iran, including Urmia, the provincial center, and the Yezidis in Nineveh Province, which use Latin alphabet.

The first attempts of the Iraqi young man - who hails from Halabja governorate in Iraqi Kurdistan and holds a BA in English from the University of Sulaymaniyah - to introduce the Sorani dialect of the Kurdish language into Google Drive dates back to 2015, and continued until 2019 after holding more than 22 continuous meetings with The company mentioned in India, Japan and others.

The Iraqi young man succeeded in entering about 1.5 million statistics into the engine system, of which more than 235,000 are only translation texts, as he confirms in his interview with Al Jazeera Net, in addition to more than one million ratifications of the Kurdish language and its vocabulary in the engine.

Al-Jaf did not give in to the despair that struck him at the beginning of his attempts by not receiving any material or moral support from government agencies or others, but by chance led him on one of the visits of the US Consul General in the region to Halabja Governorate in 2018, so he asked him for his help and support, but the consul refused to help him Financially because Google is a private company and not affiliated with the US government.

After that, the American consul promised the Iraqi young man to help him reach some of the engineers working at Google and asked him to wait for a response, adds Jaff;

What he was waiting for came after about two months through an official email from the US Foreign Affairs at the consulate, including finding a way to communicate with one of the engineers in the company.

Al-Jaf (center) with the American Consul in Erbil (communication sites)

The second step

After getting to know the engineer at Google, Al-Jaf held regular meetings with him on a daily basis and discussed the details of the Kurdish language, its vocabulary, and the mechanisms for entering it into the engine application.

Bokan describes the success of his project as a "great and very important achievement", but at the same time he confirms the state of sadness that afflicted him for the lack of government agencies' interest in his creativity other than presenting certificates and cards of thanks and appreciation to him, without financial assistance, at a time when he personally spends his own money that he collected from his work. Internet shop for his project.

After the success of his first step, the Iraqi young man aspires to enter the voice translation into the application after he entered the text translation, but he acknowledges the difficulty of the matter in principle due to the lack of the required requirements, the material ones first, in addition to a lot of time, advanced computers and a full specialized team, as he confirms that the introduction of The dialect-only draft took him 7 years to implement.

In response to a question about the translation success rate, especially with regard to some problems related to syntax or adding infinitive suffixes, Al-Jaf says that it reaches 85%, although the percentage of errors in it is very few, which is avoided by the application over time according to its program in this regard with vocabulary. The ramifications of the Kurdish language, which became competing with Arabic days after it was adopted by Google, according to him.

Behrouz al-Jaf expected that the Google application would contribute to accelerating the translation of international literature into Kurdish (Al-Jazeera)

Who are the beneficiaries?

The academic and professor at the University of Sulaymaniyah, Dr. Behrouz al-Jaf, praises this service and considers it very useful for workers in the government corps and its civil and military institutions, especially politicians and jurists, as well as Arab and foreign intellectuals who are interested in Kurdish political, literary and linguistic affairs, in addition to subscribers in social networks.

Google translation provides - according to the speech of the university professor to Al-Jazeera Net - a great service for the Kurdish language and its users, as in addition to the possibility of facilitating translation for each individual, it works to achieve a balance in the grammatical aspect, the form of words and the priority of their use, and then spread it to be a unified, standard and stable language for its users, making it irrelevant. Problems in its legal and scientific uses, in addition to its general uses in writing, journalism, and social media.

He points out that this use may not be free from the possibility of slips due to the entry of a huge amount of words, terms and modern linguistic uses, especially those associated with scientific and technological development, leading to a departure from the reality established by history, culture and Kurdish literature, especially that the Kurdish language lacks a unified normative literature that governs To him in using a standard language as in the Arabs' use of the Holy Qur'an as a standard language.

Al-Jaf expects that the Google application will contribute to accelerating the translation of international literature into Kurdish, which will contribute to the communication of Kurdish culture and its cross-fertilization with global cultures, which helps enrich it and contribute to the development of local and global civilization.

Nawzad called on the concerned authorities in the Kurdistan region to take care of the youth and develop their capabilities and creativity (Al-Jazeera)

government default

For her part, a member of the Parliament of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Shadi Nawzad, described the Bukan project as a model and a living witness to the creativity and capabilities of Kurdish youth despite the failure of government and concerned authorities to support them and provide them with support to achieve their goals and ambitions.

In her speech to Al-Jazeera Net, Nawzad regretted the view held by some political parties in the region about the capabilities of young people and the lack of recognition of their successes, despite their great achievements over the past years.

Nawzad acknowledges that the Kurdish government has not succeeded in proving its youthfulness in terms of supporting youth segments and their capabilities, calling for the need to change this view, whether within the political parties or the government itself, with the need to change the parties' vision towards the capabilities and creativity of young people.

It is noteworthy that Google had announced in 2016 that the translation section would be supplemented with Kurmanji, the dialect used by the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and about half of Iraqi Kurdistan, in addition to the Kurds in Russia and Lebanon.

Google launched the translation service in 2006 and it uses an advanced machine learning approach called Zero-Shot Machine Translation, where the model learns a new language without seeing any direct translation of it.