A partnership to provide technology in African languages is
helping to make content and software more accessible to people across the
continent.
The
African continent is linguistically complex. Most countries have numerous indigenous
languages and lingua francas. Some estimates suggest there are more than 2000
African languages, according to ethnologue.com (depending on how one
distinguishes between closely related and inter-intelligible tongues). The
various European languages inherited from the colonial era and retained for
official use, add another layer to this complexity, although in some contexts
they can facilitate wider communication.
In
such multilingual settings, the language(s) used is always a matter of choice,
and that choice may have consequences. For example, deciding to work in one
language rather than another affects who can effectively participate within a
community, or can make a difference to how indigenous knowledge is used. Also,
much traditional development work relies on multilingual extension officers or
locals for translation, but for projects using ICTs, reliance on intermediaries
is not always practical or desirable.
Fortunately,
translation can be done before users access ICTs. Computers can, in principle,
operate in any and all human languages. At the most basic level, this means
ensuring that computer systems can handle special characters or non-Latin
alphabets. Adding African language interfaces and content is not only possible
but practical, as well as desirable, as people tend to access technology and
information more readily in languages they know best. These languages, however,
are often not the ones that dominate in the field of ICT.
The
Bisharat initiative was launched in Mali in 2000 to help focus attention on the
use of African languages in ICT projects. At that time, it was clear that
African language content was barely visible on the emerging agenda for what is
now called ICTs for development. Also, in the case of languages like Bambara,
whose alphabets include modified Latin characters, there were challenges
related to the use of locally developed ‘special fonts’. These realizations in
turn pointed to two needs – to emphasize the importance of African language
content and computer interfaces, and to explore ways to overcome the technical
issues connected with alphabets like that of Bambara.
The
Bisharat website and discussion forums were the most extensive efforts, at the
time, to explore the issues related to the use of African languages in ICTs.
This work eventually led to discussions in 2004 between Canada’s International
Development Research Centre (IDRC) and Bisharat, and later also involving the
NGO, Kabissa. The talks resulted in a new Pan-African Localisation (PAL)
project to enhance the localization of technology in Africa, with particular
focus on development and education.
By
the time the PAL project began in April 2005, web-based content in African
languages and some Africa-based projects to localize software were starting to
appear. A PAL workshop in Pretoria, South Africa, in November 2007, brought
together various people working to adapt technology to local languages. Their
presentations described recent efforts to localize open source software in
languages such as Wolof and Kinyarwanda, to increase web content in local
languages (including blogs and a dictionary in Swahili), as well as efforts to
develop terminology in languages such as Lingala, and research on speech
recognition for Yoruba and Somali.
Add
to these the efforts of Microsoft to localize much of its Windows and Office
software into some African languages, and the commitment of the One Laptop per
Child project to accommodate languages of the countries in which it will work,
and an emerging trend is clear. A new IDRC-funded PAL project, led by
Translate.org.za, will begin in 2008 to focus on developing some key elements
for localization in Africa, such as local data files, keyboard layouts and
terminology. It will also look at how governmental policies, with regard to
language and ICTs, can affect localization.
The
payoff for all of these efforts will be in their use on the ground. New and
existing projects designed to use ICTs for development and education will need
to incorporate these localization schemes. As the availability of software in
more languages increases through local efforts and projects like PAL, there
will be less technical justification for overlooking African languages in ICT
projects in Africa. There is a need, however, for continued efforts to improve
the connection between what are too often regarded as separate concerns: ICTs
for development in Africa, and the localization of software and content in
African languages. Fonts, keyboards, and, for some African languages, entire
software office applications are already available as free or low-cost
value-added elements to enable computer systems used by ICT for development
projects in Africa to fully accommodate the languages of their intended users.
Part
of the challenge now is the marketing of African language products, and part is
overcoming an apparent mindset that adding a new African language capacity to
computers somehow detracts from the existing one, usually English or French.
Ultimately, the technical issues for including African languages in ICTs may be
less daunting than changing perceptions regarding the potential of using these
languages on computers and the internet, and the lack of information about what
is already being done. Multilingual computing is a reality – how Africans can
exploit it optimally and appropriately is the question that now needs to be
addressed.
Don Osborn
is the founder and director of Bisharat