About Itumo
Built for the languages a generic translator gets wrong
Itumo exists because African languages are usually treated as an afterthought by translation tools built primarily for European and Asian languages. We built the opposite: a translator that takes tone marks, underdots, and native scripts as seriously as any accent or character set, in every direction — African to world, world to African, and African to African.
Itumo translates between major African indigenous languages — Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Swahili, Amharic, Zulu, and Wolof — and major world languages like German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese (Mandarin), and Dutch. Every result is checked for accuracy before it’s shown to you, including corrections for missing tone marks, diacritics, or script errors, on whichever side of the translation they appear.
We built Itumo for the people who actually live between languages: Africans on the continent and in the diaspora, families who communicate across borders and generations, students and professionals who need a message, document, or conversation to be exactly right — not approximately right.
Not just Africa-to-world
Direct African-to-African translation, done properly
A growing number of the people who use Itumo aren't translating to or from English or German at all — they're translating directly between two African languages. We treat those pairs as core to the product, not a side effect of supporting each language individually.
Every one of the languages in our language guide below can be paired with any other — African-to-African included — with the same accuracy checks and orthography corrections applied either way.
What we care about
The standard every translation is held to
Exceptional accuracy, checked every time
Every translation is verified for correctness before it reaches you — not a best-effort guess, a checked result you can act on.
Every mark, every accent, every script
Yoruba tone marks, Igbo underdots, Amharic's Ge'ez script, Wolof's extra letters, Chinese characters, German umlauts — Itumo catches what's missing and corrects it automatically, on both sides of a translation.
African-to-African is a first-class feature
Wolof to Igbo, Swahili to Hausa, Zulu to Amharic — direct pairs between African languages get the same rigor as any pair involving English or German, not a lesser afterthought bolted onto a Europe-facing tool.
Built for Africa and its diaspora, everywhere
Whether you're at home, studying abroad, running a business across borders, or keeping in touch with family in another country, Itumo is built around how people actually move between languages.
Language guide
Every language Itumo speaks, and what it takes to get it right
Each language has its own rules for what counts as correctly written — a tone mark, an underdot, a whole different script. This is what Itumo checks for automatically on every translation, no matter which two languages you pick.
African languages
Tone marks and underdots (ẹ ọ ṣ, à á, etc.) matter and change meaning.
Underdotted letters (ị ọ ụ ṅ) matter and change meaning.
Hooked letters (ɓ ɗ ƙ) and the ʼy glottal stop matter.
No tone marks or accents, but standard noun-class prefixes and digraphs like ng' and ny matter.
Written in the Ge'ez (Fidel) script — correct letter forms and the right order of the syllabary matter.
No accents, but correct noun-class prefixes and consonant clusters (hl, dl, ny) matter.
Latin script with extra letters (ñ, ŋ) and doubled vowels/consonants for length (aa, bb) — these change meaning and must be kept exact.
World languages
Umlauts (ä ö ü) and ß matter — e.g. "schoen" should be "schön".
Accents (á é í ó ú), ñ, and inverted ¿ ¡ punctuation matter.
Accents (é è ê à ù) and the cedilla (ç) matter.
Accents and nasalization marks (ã õ á é ê ç) matter.
Written in simplified Chinese characters — use the correct standard character for each word, not a homophone or a traditional-script variant.
Diaeresis marks (ë ï) and doubled vowels for long sounds (aa, ee, oo) matter, e.g. "voetbal" not "voetbaal".
Don’t see a language you need? We’re adding more regularly — let us know which one to prioritize next.