Amharic, English and 110 More Languages

A message arrives in Amharic and all you see is beautiful script you cannot read. Or you need to reply to someone in Ethiopia and your English feels shaky. Language Translation Bot handles it inside Telegram, no extra app required. 🌍

Built with Amharic in mind

The bot comes from an Ethiopian developer team and it shows. Command hints are written in Amharic, and the headline pairing in its description is English to Amharic and back.

It is not limited to that pair, though. The bot claims more than 110 languages, so Spanish, Arabic, Russian or French are covered too.

More than 10,000 people use it every month, most of them because they need Amharic specifically.

Why Amharic is tricky for machines

Amharic is the working language of Ethiopia and is spoken by tens of millions of people. It is written in the Ge'ez script, also called fidel, where each character stands for a whole syllable. ✍️

Machine translation struggles more here than with major European languages. There is less training text available, and a lot of meaning gets packed into prefixes and suffixes on a single word. Short, plain sentences come out far better than long ones.

Your first translation in four steps

1. Press Start to launch the bot.
2. Send /set and pick the language you want to translate into.
3. Type or paste your text as a normal message and the translation comes back.
4. Use /set again whenever you want to switch direction.

If something goes wrong, /start resets the bot. Questions and feedback go through /support, and /help covers the basics.

Getting cleaner results

• Keep sentences short. One idea per sentence means fewer mistakes.
• Skip slang and idioms. Proverbs and jokes often get translated word for word.
• Run a back translation. Translate the result back to your language. If the meaning survives, send it.
• Handle names separately. Names, addresses and brand names are best added by hand.

Who gets the most out of it

• Travelers to Ethiopia. Prepare key phrases in advance and translate signs or menus on the go.
• People working with Ethiopian partners. Catch the meaning of a message in a work chat in seconds.
• Language learners. Double check a word or phrase while studying Amharic or English.

When to call a human instead

For chats, listings and getting the gist of a message, machine translation does the job. For contracts, medical papers or anything where an error costs money or health, hire a professional translator. ⚠️

Also keep in mind that your text is processed by a third party. Avoid sending passport numbers, passwords or confidential messages through any translation bot.