Using the 'kompyuta' to save African languages (fwd)

Fri Nov 12 17:22:12 UTC 2004

Using the 'kompyuta' to save African languages

By Marc Lacey
http://news.com.com/Using+the+kompyuta+to+save+African+languages/2100-7337_3-5449598.html

Story last modified November 12, 2004, 6:10 AM PST

NAIROBI, Kenya--Swahili speakers wishing to use a "kompyuta"--as
computer is rendered in Swahili--have been out of luck when it comes to
communicating in their tongue.

Computers, no matter how bulky their hard drives or sophisticated their
software packages, have not yet mastered Swahili or hundreds of other
indigenous African languages.

But that may soon change. Across the continent, linguists are working
with experts in information technology to make computers more
accessible to Africans who happen not to know English, French or the
other major languages that have been programmed into the world's
desktops.

There are economic reasons for the outreach. Microsoft, which is working
to incorporate Swahili into Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and
other popular programs, sees a market for its software among the
roughly 100 million Swahili speakers in East Africa. The same goes for
Google, which last month launched www.google.co.ke, offering a Kenyan
version in Swahili of the popular search engine.

But the campaign to Africanize cyberspace is not all about the bottom
line. There are hundreds of languages in Africa--some spoken only by a
few dozen elders--and they are dying out at an alarming rate. The
continent's linguists see the computer as one important way of saving
them. Unesco estimates that 90 percent of the world's 6,000 languages
are not represented on the Internet, and that one language is
disappearing somewhere around the world every two weeks.

"Technology can overrun these languages and entrench Anglophone
imperialism," said Tunde Adegbola, a Nigerian computer scientist and
linguist who is working to preserve Yoruba, a West African language
spoken by millions of people in western Nigeria as well as in Cameroon
and Niger. "But if we act, we can use technology to preserve these
so-called minority languages."

Experts say that putting local languages on the screen will also lure
more Africans to information technology, narrowing the digital divide
between the world's rich and poor.

As it is now, Internet cafes are becoming more and more common in even
the smallest of African towns, but most of the people at the keyboards
are the educated elite. Wireless computer networks are appearing--there
is one at the Nairobi airport and another at the Intercontinental Hotel
in Kigali, Rwanda's capital--but they are geared for the wealthy, not
the working class.

Extending the computer era to the remote reaches of Africa requires more
than just wiring the villages. Experts say that software must be
developed and computer keyboards adapted so that Swahili speakers and
those who communicate in Amharic, Yoruba, Hausa, Sesotho and many other
languages spoken in Africa feel at home.

Adegbola, executive director of the African Languages Technology
Initiative, has developed a keyboard able to deal with the complexities
of Yoruba, a tonal language. Different Yoruba words are written the
same way using the Latin alphabet--the tones that differentiate them
are indicated by extra punctuation. It can take many different
keystrokes to complete a Yoruba word.

To accomplish the same result with fewer, more comfortable keystrokes,
Adegbola made a keyboard without the letters Q, Z, X, C and V, which
Yoruba does not use. He repositioned the vowels, which are
high-frequency, to more prominent spots and added accent marks and
other symbols, creating what he calls Africa's first indigenous
language keyboard. Now, Adegbola is at work on voice recognition
software that can convert spoken Yoruba into text.

Related research is under way in Ethiopia. Amharic, the official
language, has 345 letters and letter variations, which has made
developing a coherent keyboard difficult. Further complicating the
project, the country also has its own system of time and its own
calendar.

Still, computer experts at Addis Ababa University are making headway.
Recently, they came up with a system that will allow Amharic speakers
to send text messages, a relatively new phenomenon in the country.

The researchers involved in the project envision it as more than a way
for Amharic-speaking teenagers to gossip among themselves. Text
messaging could be a development tool, they say, if farmers in remote
areas of the country can get instant access to coffee prices or weather
reports.

The Ethiopian researchers hope a cell phone maker will see the country's
millions of Amharic speakers as a big enough market to turn their
concept into a commercial Amharic handset.

Adegbola has similar dreams. He is distributing his keyboard free to
influential Yoruba speakers, hoping to attract some deep-pocketed
entrepreneur who could turn it into a business venture.

In South Africa, researchers at the Unit for Language Facilitation and
Empowerment at the University of the Free State are working on a
computerized translation system between English and two local
languages, Afrikaans and Southern Sotho. Cobus Snyman, who heads the
project, said the goal is to extend the system to Xhosa, Venda, Tsonga
and other South African languages.

One of Microsoft's motivations in localizing its software is to try to
head off the movement toward open-source operating systems like Linux,
which are increasingly popular. South Africa has already adopted Linux,
which it considers more cost efficient and more likely to stimulate
local software development.

Patrick Opiyo, the Microsoft official in charge of the Swahili program,
portrays the effort as more about community outreach than business
development. Besides Swahili, the company is looking at making its
products more available to those who speak Amharic, Zulu and Yoruba and
the other two widely used languages in Nigeria--Hausa and Igbo.

In Kenya, Microsoft has rounded up some of the region's top Swahili
scholars to come up with a glossary of 3,000 technical terms--the first
step in the company's effort to make Microsoft products accessible to
Swahili speakers.

Sitting around a conference table recently in Microsoft's sleek offices
in downtown Nairobi, the linguists discussed how to convey basic words
from the computer age in Swahili, also known as Kiswahili, beginning
with the most basic one of all.

"When these modern machines arrived, Kiswahili came up with a quick word
for something that didn't exist in our culture," said Clara Momanyi, a
Swahili professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. "That was
'kompyuta.'"

But scholars subsequently opted for a more local term to describe these
amazing machines, she said. It is "tarakilishi," which is a combination
of the word for "image" and the word for "represent."

The Swahili experts grappled with a variety of other words. How does one
say "folder"? Should it be "folda," which is commonly used, or
"kifuko," a more formal term?

Is a fax a "faksi," as the Tanzanians call it, or a "kipepesi"?

Everyone seemed to agree that an e-mail message was a "barua pepe,"
which means a fast letter. Everyone also seemed to agree that the
effort they were engaged in to bring Swahili to cyberspace was long
overdue.

"Every continent seems to have a language in the computer, and here we
are with nothing," said Mwanashehe Saum Mohammed, a Swahili expert at
the United States International University in Nairobi and one of the
Microsoft consultants. "This will make Africans feel part of the world
community. The fact that the continent is full of poor people doesn't
mean we shouldn't be on the world map--or in the computer."