Lost in Translation: Evaluating the Performance of Five Publicly Available Machine-Translators for Luganda-English Interpretation

Luganda, after English, is the most popular language in Uganda (Ssentanda and Nakayiza, 2015), boasting over 20 million speakers across the globe in 2021 (New Vision, 2021). Despite its ubiquity, Luganda has been labelled a “low resource language” (Kimera et al., 2025). This project aims to evaluate the performance of five publicly available services (Bing Translator, Google Translate, Perplexity AI, ChatGPT, Google Gemini) in Luganda to English and English to Luganda Translation.