PM Masrour Barzani thanks Google for adding Kurdish Sorani 

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani thanked Google on Thursday for adding the Kurdish language’s Sorani dialect to its translation service. 

The giant US-based corporation announced on Wednesday that it had added the Sorani dialect of the Kurdish language to Google Translate. While the Kurmanji dialect has been available for some time now, this is the first time Google Translate offers Sorani translations. 

“Thank you very much Google,” Masrour Barzani tweeted in response to the company’s announcement in Kurdish on Thursday. 

زۆر سوپاس گووگڵ. https://t.co/waUvdnqFAb

— Masrour Barzani (@masrour_barzani) May 12, 2022

Sorani was one of the 24 new languages Google added to its popular translation service, which already provides translations in 133 languages. 

“And we want to make this possible for even more people — especially those whose languages aren’t represented in most technology,” the company said in a blog post. 

Kurdish Sorani dialect is used by “eight million people, mostly in Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan),” according to the post. 

The corporation said it appreciated the role and efforts of a number of native Kurdish speakers who made the addition of Sorani into the service possible. These included Bokan Jaff, Medya Ghazizadeh, Roshna Omer Abdulrahman, Saman Vaisipour, and Sarchia Khursheed.

The global search engine added the Kurdish Kurmanji dialect in 2016. Microsoft also added the languages’ dual dialects to its translator in 2020. 

Facebook presently offers Sorani translations but not Kurmanji ones.