What it does
Yarn Pidgin translates between Nigerian Pidgin and English in both directions. Type a phrase you saw in a group chat, a song or a comment thread and Yarn gives you the English meaning, or type English and get it the way someone in Lagos, Port Harcourt or Warri might say it.
Nigerian Pidgin is spoken by tens of millions of people across Nigeria and the diaspora, but most translation tools treat it as broken English and get it wrong. Yarn treats it as its own language, with its own grammar and expressions.
How it works
Yarn is rule-based. Instead of guessing with a black-box model, it uses a phrasebook of real expressions plus grammar rules for things like tense markers (dey, don, go) and negation (no, never). That makes results predictable: the same phrase always gets the same translation, and when a translation is wrong it can be fixed at the source.
A few examples
| Pidgin | English |
|---|---|
| How far? | Hi, how are you? / What's up? |
| Wetin dey happen? | What's happening? |
| I no sabi | I don't know |
| Abeg, help me | Please, help me |
| No wahala | No problem |
Help make it better
Pidgin changes from city to city and spelling varies (dey or de, wetin or wettin). If a translation looks off, you can suggest a better one or vote on other people's suggestions right inside the app. Every suggestion goes into a review queue and is only published after it has been checked, so the phrasebook keeps growing without filling up with mistakes.
Good to know
- Short, everyday phrases give the best results; long, slang-heavy paragraphs may come back partly translated.
- Yarn doesn't need an account and doesn't store the text you translate with your identity.