English to Wolof Translator by Janga Wolof

Please note this Wolof phrase translator is nowhere near perfect. For serious translation projects, we suggest finding an actual paid professional translation service or a native speaker that is also fluent in English. For casual users, this translator can be a great tool as an entry point into communicating with Wolof speakers, just remember some basic grammar rules, and double-check individual word meanings with an actual Wolof dictionary or speaker. As with English, Wolof words can have multiple meanings, and phrases can have literal meanings that don't exactly match how it's understood in common usage. Context often defines how a word or phrase is translated so keep that in mind as this translator is very basic and doesn't always get the context right.

This is not Google Translate so don't expect too much. Creating a robust translator, especially for a non-Latin language requires a lot of resources and expertise.

There have been a lot of requests to add audio with the translations. That's not going to happen 😀. Again, that would require resources and expertise beyond the scope of this project.

Some users have taken issue with orthography and/or translations of individual words they are not familiar with. Despite what you may have been taught there isn't a universally accepted orthography for the Wolof language. The orthography developed by the CLAD institute is probably the most widely used and is what is generally used in official contexts. For example: the spelling of the Wolof word for 'water' is 'ndox' according to CLAD, not 'ndoh' as some users have suggested.

This translator uses data from many different sources so the orthography isn't standardized, however the majority of the data is very close to the standard CLAD orthography.

There are for certain mistakes in the data where the translations of some individual words may be incorrect, however, just because you have learned a certain word means something doesn't mean that's the only word that means that or that the word itself doesn't have more than one definition. For example, there is more than one Wolof word for 'mother'.

The way this translator works is primarily with word for word and phrase for phrase translations, so unless you just happen to hit on the exact right combination of words then the grammar is likely going to be a little off, possibly even off by a lot. For example, this translator doesn't naturally handle plural nouns very well. Plural nouns have to be added manually to the database, and while an effort has been made to do so for many of the most common nouns it is impossible to do so for every noun. Same idea applies to verb tenses.