  This paper introduces two multilingual government themed corpora in various
South African languages. The corpora were collected by gathering the South
African Government newspaper (Vuk'uzenzele), as well as South African
government speeches (ZA-gov-multilingual), that are translated into all 11
South African official languages. The corpora can be used for a myriad of
downstream NLP tasks. The corpora were created to allow researchers to study
the language used in South African government publications, with a focus on
understanding how South African government officials communicate with their
constituents. In this paper we highlight the process of gathering, cleaning and
making available the corpora. We create parallel sentence corpora for Neural
Machine Translation (NMT) tasks using Language-Agnostic Sentence
Representations (LASER) embeddings. With these aligned sentences we then
provide NMT benchmarks for 9 indigenous languages by fine-tuning a massively
multilingual pre-trained language model.
