Ithrafikhi? isiZulu and Afrikaans now part of Google Maps’ languages

If you’re planning to let Google Maps be your guide in isiZulu on a road trip over the Easter holidays‚ be prepared to encounter a few linguistic speed bumps along the way.

Google Maps programme manager Atsuko Yamagami announced that the service has added 39 new languages—spoken by an estimated 1.25 billion people worldwide.

They are: Afrikaans‚ Albanian‚ Amharic‚ Armenian‚ Azerbaijani‚ Bosnian‚ Burmese‚ Croatian‚ Czech‚ Danish‚ Estonian‚ Filipino‚ Finnish‚ Georgian‚ Hebrew‚ Icelandic‚ Indonesian‚ Kazakh‚ Khmer‚ Kyrgyz‚ Lao‚ Latvian‚ Lithuanian‚ Macedonian‚ Malay‚ Mongolian‚ Norwegian‚ Persian‚ Romanian‚ Serbian‚ Slovak‚ Slovenian‚ Swahili‚ Swedish‚ Turkish‚ Ukrainian‚ Uzbek‚ Vietnamese‚ and isiZulu.

TimesLIVE has remotely tested the navigation in isiZulu from Johannesburg to Cape Town and noticed some confusing sentence construction and a few odd translation mishaps.

For example‚ a ‘minute’ is called ‘umzuzu’ in isiZulu but on the map it is described as ‘iminithi’.

Traffic is actually ‘isiminyaminya’ and not ‘ithrafikhi’ as referred to using the online map service.

They got the word for ‘hour’ right‚ which is commonly written as ‘ihora’.