Masakhane WEB - A Machine Translation Web Platform for Solely African Languages

Masakhane meaning ‘we build together’, is a research effort for machine translation for African languages which is open source and online. So far, the community has built translation models for over 38 African languages. As such, Masakhane Web is a platform that aims to host the already trained models from the community and allow contributions from users to create new data for retraining. The objective of this web application is to provide access to an open-source platform that makes available relatively accurate translations for languages across Africa. If you can't find your language and/or would like to train your own machine translation model in your language, see https://github.com/masakhane-io/masakhane-mt on how you can contribute.

Disclaimer: This system is for research purposes only and should be taken as work in progress. None of the trained models are suitable for production usage.

How to run
- As a stand alone app
  - Backend
  - Frontend
- Using Docker (Prefered)
Contributing
Contact Us

How to run

As a stand alone app

Backend

Install required packages
- pip install -r requirements.txt
run the app :
- move to the server directory : cd src/server/
- export FLASK_APP=core/__init__.py
- python manage.py run

Note: The stand alone app uses sqlite as db instead of postgreSQL like our live app, you then need to run the command below to create and initialize the datbase.

Create table relations
- python manage.py create_db
Add languages
- python manage.py add_language en-sw
Check available languages
- python manage.py all_language
Update known languages
- curl --request GET 'http://127.0.0.1:5000/update'

You can check content saved in the dabase using the code below :

import sqlite3, os

conn = sqlite3.connect("masakhane.db")
c = conn.cursor()

for row in c.execute('SELECT * FROM feedback'):
    print(row)

for row in c.execute('SELECT * FROM language'):
    print(row)

Frontend

install the following: \
- node.js
- yarn
To run:
- move to the client directory : cd src/client/
- run yarn start

This runs the app in development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

View https://github.com/dsfsi/masakhane-web/tree/master/src/client on how you can contribute to improve the look of the website.

Using Docker (Prefered)

The better way to run the app is to use Docker, which will take care of running both the frontend and backend easily.

Install Docker and Docker-compose

Run the following command to check if you have docker and docker-compose installed in your computer : - docker --version - docker-compose --version

If you get the information about the version and not an error you can skeep the details below and just to the Using Docker section.

Docker : https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/
Docker-compose : https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/

To make sure that it is well installed you can run the code above to check the version of the installed docker and docker-compose

Run the App

run the app
- sudo docker-compose up -d --build from the root project.
shutdown the app
- sudo docker-compose down
create_db
- sudo docker-compose exec server python manage.py create_db
check the database
- sudo docker-compose exec db psql --username=masakhane --dbname=masakhane
  - list databases\l
  - connect to the masakhane database\c masakhane
  - list relations \dt
  - to quit \q
  - to see saved information in a relation select * from language; or
  - to see feedbacks in a relation select * from feedback;

Add, Delete and Update supported languages

check the available models in memory sudo docker-compose exec server python manage.py all_language
add a new language,
- e.g English-Swahili (note: we are using JW300 shortform) sudo docker-compose exec server python manage.py add_language en-swcurre
- (English-Yoruba) sudo docker-compose exec server python manage.py add_language en-yo
delete a language sudo docker-compose exec server python manage.py remove_language en-sw
run this on the production server to update the models curl --request GET 'http://127.0.0.1:5000/update'

Contributing

Options

Can't see your language as one of the supported languages: Visit Masakhane:Building your first machine translation model to learn more about how you can train a model for your language.
I have an idea or a new feature: Create a new issue first, assign it to yourself and then fork the repo
I want to help in improving the accuracy of the models: Check out below on how you can reach out to us