Product

Translate documents into
your mother tongue.

Tarjumi translates documents from English into local African languages. Kikuyu, Swahili, Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin, and more. Google Translate doesn't support most of these. We do.

What you get from this page

A working translator for local African languages. Paste your text, select the target language, and get a translation. Also works as document input — translate contracts, health guides, educational materials, or government notices into the language your community actually speaks.

Translate
Text, article, or document. Any language.

Paste text, drop in a news article URL, or type directly. Select your target language. Tarjumi handles the rest.

Source: English
Translate to:
Translation will appear here...
How Tarjumi Works
Understanding first. Translation second.

Most translation tools do word substitution. Tarjumi understands the meaning of your text across languages using cross-lingual embeddings, then generates a natural translation in the target language. The difference: it knows that "dawa" and "medicine" mean the same thing without looking up a dictionary.

01 — Detect
Identify the language

Automatic language detection for 75+ languages, including Kikuyu and other Bantu languages that standard detectors miss entirely.

02 — Understand
Cross-lingual meaning

LaBSE embeddings map your text into a universal meaning space shared across 109 languages. Kikuyu and English live in the same vector space.

03 — Translate
Generate natural output

Neural machine translation produces fluent output in your target language. Not word-for-word substitution — actual sentences that sound natural.

04 — Verify
Convergent quality check

Back-translation and embedding similarity scoring verify the translation preserved meaning. If quality is uncertain, Tarjumi tells you.

Languages
The languages Google forgot.

42 million Kenyans speak a mother tongue that isn't fully supported by major translation platforms. Tarjumi starts with Kenyan languages and expands across the continent.

Xhosa
isiXhosa
19M speakers
BLEU 35.7 — Excellent (+16 vs base)
Swahili
Kiswahili
100M+ speakers
BLEU 35.9 — High quality
Kinyarwanda
Ikinyarwanda
12M speakers
BLEU 24.1 — Excellent (+8 vs base)
Zulu
isiZulu
12M speakers
BLEU 22.7 — Strong (+8 vs base)
Kikuyu
Gĩkũyũ
8.1M speakers
BLEU 22.5 — Strong
Luganda
Oluganda
8.2M speakers
BLEU 19.6 — Strong (+5 vs base)
Yoruba
Ẹdè Yorùbá
47M speakers
BLEU 19.3 — Strong (+9 vs base)
Shona
chiShona
14M speakers
BLEU 19.1 — Strong (+10 vs base)
Luo
Dholuo
4.4M speakers
BLEU 23.0 — Strong
Kamba
Kikamba
4.7M speakers
BLEU 13.3 — Developing
Gusii
Ekegusii
2.2M speakers
Coming soon — refining quality
Somali
Soomaali
22M speakers
BLEU 7.6 — Early stage
Amharic
አማርኛ
32M speakers
BLEU 6.6 — Limited (+2 vs base)
Luhya
Oluluhya
6.8M speakers
Coming soon — refining quality
Kalenjin
Kalenjin
5.4M speakers
Coming soon — refining quality
Maasai
Maa
1.2M speakers
Coming soon — refining quality
Meru
Kĩmĩĩrũ
2.1M speakers
Coming soon — refining quality

BLEU scores measured on standard public benchmarks (Masakhane-MT, MAFAND-MT, TICO-19), English → target direction, 1,400–3,000+ sentence pairs per language. Kenyan language scores shown from Masakhane-MT (religious domain). The current model (v7) uses a Levelt pipeline with beam reranking, grammar validation, and register correction. Languages marked "Coming soon" are being refined and will be available in the playground once quality meets our threshold. View full benchmark results →

Use Cases
Knowledge shouldn't require English.
Health guides

Translate maternal health guides, vaccination schedules, and disease prevention materials into the language community health workers actually use with patients.

Education

Textbooks, exam materials, and government curricula translated for students learning in their mother tongue. Comprehension improves when the language matches the student.

Legal documents

Contracts, land titles, and government notices in the language of the people they affect. Understanding your rights shouldn't require a translator.

Emergency alerts

Flood warnings, disease outbreaks, evacuation notices. When minutes matter, people respond faster in their first language.

Agricultural extension

Farming guides, weather advisories, market prices — translated for the farmers who need them most. A Kikuyu farmer reads Kikuyu, not English.

Government services

Huduma Centre forms, eCitizen instructions, KRA guidelines. Public services should be accessible in every official and national language.

🌐
Website localization

One script tag. Your entire website in Swahili, Kikuyu, or any supported language. No CMS plugins, no translation files to manage. Your users switch languages and the page updates live.

Built for the languages that built us.

The word "tarjumi" comes from Arabic (ترجمة) via Swahili — meaning "translation." It's fitting: a word that has already crossed languages now names a tool that helps others do the same. Every language carries knowledge, culture, and identity. When we translate, we don't just convert words — we open doors.

Tech Stack
Cross-lingual AI. No dictionary lookups.

Tarjumi uses neural models that understand meaning across languages — not lookup tables. The same embedding space holds Kikuyu and English, so the system knows they're related before translating a single word.

Understanding

LaBSE

Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embeddings. 109 languages in one vector space. Swahili trains the model; Kikuyu transfers via Bantu family similarity.

Translation

NLLB-200 v7

Meta's No Language Left Behind, fine-tuned bidirectionally on 4.42M tier-rebalanced parallel pairs across 16 African languages. Levelt pipeline adds beam reranking, grammar validation, and register correction. Up to 35.9 BLEU on Swahili. Trained on 2× H100 GPUs.

Detection

Lingua + Heuristics

Automatic language identification with custom heuristics for Bantu languages. Detects Kikuyu via diacritical markers that standard detectors miss.

Verification

Convergent QA

Back-translation + embedding similarity as dual-path quality check. If two independent paths agree the meaning was preserved, the translation holds.

Localization
Localize your website with one line of code.

Add a single script tag. Your users get a language switcher. Every text element on your page translates live — no CMS plugin, no JSON files to maintain, no developer time per language. Works on any website.

Embed

One script tag

<script src="https://tarjumi.thexi.dev/i18n/snippet.js" data-target="sw|ki|luo"></script>

Live translation

No static files

The snippet detects text on your page, sends it to Tarjumi's API, and replaces it in-place. A language picker appears automatically. Translations are cached so repeat visits are instant.

Control

Tag what matters

Use data-i18n="key" to tag elements explicitly, or data-i18n-skip to exclude elements like brand names. The snippet handles the rest.

Feedback built in

Users improve translations

Your visitors can flag bad translations and suggest corrections directly on the page. Every correction feeds back into the model. Your site gets better the more people use it.

Privacy
Your text, your language, your data.

Translation requires seeing text. Here's exactly what happens with yours — and what doesn't.

Website Translation

Nothing stored

When you switch languages on a page, your text is sent over HTTPS to our server, translated in memory, and returned. We store only anonymous content hashes for quality tracking — never the text itself, never your identity.

Document Translation

Processed, not kept

Documents are translated on our server and returned to your browser. We don't store your documents, don't log them, and don't use them for training. The file never touches a third-party service.

Corrections

Opt-in only

If you choose to suggest a correction, that text is stored as a training pair to improve future translations. This is the only time text is retained — and only because you explicitly submitted it.

No tracking

Zero telemetry

No cookies, no user IDs, no fingerprinting, no analytics pixels. We count how many translations happen per language — nothing about who requested them.

Start free. Scale when ready.

Every plan includes all 16 languages. No card required for Free.

Your language is not a barrier
to knowledge.

Tarjumi is built by CIF AI. We're starting with Kenyan languages and expanding across the continent. If your language isn't listed yet, reach out — we'll add it.