Using a New Language in Africa to Save Dying Ones
 
November 12, 2004
 By MARC LACEY
 
NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov. 11 - 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.
 
Mr. 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, Mr.
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, Mr. 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 cellphone maker will see the country's millions
of Amharic speakers as a big enough market to turn their concept into a
commercial Amharic handset.
 
Mr. 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."
 
 
 
 
中華民國94年2月11日星期五
http://www.libertytimes.com.tw/2005/new/feb/today/today-int13.htm
國際新聞
 
非洲土語電腦化
 
編譯陳泓達╱特譯
 
當電腦已成為現代化或全球化的代名詞,非洲東部以史瓦希里語(Swahili)為母語的原住民,卻無法使用「kompyuta」 - 即史瓦希里語的「電腦」,因為不論電腦擁有多大容量的硬碟,多麼先進的軟體,目前並未提供對史瓦希里語的支援,更不用說其他好幾百種非洲原住民語言了。
 
不過,這種情況很快就會改觀。語言學家正和資訊科技專家通力合作,在非洲大陸上推動本土語言電腦化工程,讓不懂英語、法語或其他電腦支援的世界主要語言的非洲原住民也能夠使用電腦,搭上現代化的列車。
 
擴充電腦對各類非洲本土語言的支援,有其經濟上的誘因。全球軟體巨擘微軟公司已將史瓦希里語整合到Windows視窗作業系統、Office辦公室軟體與其他流行軟體之中,以開發東非地區約一億史瓦希里語人口的龐大市場。基於相同動機,知名搜尋引擎Google也在去年十月推出肯亞版www.google.co.ke,以提供史瓦希里語介面,爭取當地原住民認同。
 
然而,網際空間非洲化的競逐並不完全以營利為目的。非洲有數百種不同語言,一部份僅通行於若干老一輩人口之間,而它們正以驚人速度走入歷史。因此,非洲語言學家認為,電腦是挽救這些本土語言免於滅絕的重要管道之一。
 
聯合國教科文組織估計,在全世界約六千種語言中,可在網際網路上再現的比率僅約一成,而且平均每兩個星期就有一種語言消失。
 
擁有電腦科學和語言學兩種專業的奈及利亞學者阿迪波拉,正積極搶救西非的優魯巴語(Yoruba)。他指出,科技進步侵奪了這些語言,鞏固了英語族群帝國主義。在奈及利亞西部、喀麥隆和尼日,優魯巴語是數百萬人通用的一種語言。「但如果我們展開行動,我們也可以利用科技的力量保存這些所謂的弱勢語言。」
 
專家指出,將這些本土語言電腦化,也可以爭取到更多非洲原住民學習資訊科技,縮小全球貧富階級之間的數位鴻溝。
 
目前,非洲各地網咖林立,連最小的城鎮也不乏蹤跡,但上門光顧的主要客群還是受過教育的知識菁英。要讓非洲偏遠地區進入電腦時代,所需要的不只是在廣大村落架設纜線而已。專家指出,還必須配合軟體的開發,以及鍵盤的調適,讓史瓦希里語族群和那些以阿比西尼亞語(Amharic,衣索匹亞官方語言)、優魯巴語、豪薩語(Hausa)、塞索托語(Sesotho),還有其他更多在地語言溝通的非洲原住民,都能夠毫無窒礙地使用電腦。
 
阿迪波拉研發出一種可處理優魯巴語的鍵盤。優魯巴是一種聲調語言,以拉丁字母呈現無法分辨不同的字詞,賴以區隔的聲調則是另以標點符號標示。因此,一個完整的優魯巴字可能涉及許多鍵位。
 
為了減少按鍵次數,阿迪波拉研發出一種沒有Q、Z、X、C和V等字母的鍵盤,因為優魯巴不需要用到這些字母。他調整了高頻率母音的位置,使其更為明顯,並加入重音和其他符號,創造出他所謂的「非洲第一種在地語言鍵盤」。目前阿迪波拉正在研發語音辨識軟體,將優魯巴語轉為文字。
 

相關研究也在衣索匹亞進行當中。衣國官方語言阿比西尼亞語共有三百四十五個字母和變體,開發一種專屬鍵盤有其困難。再者,衣國還有專屬的時間和曆法系統,益增是項工程的複雜性。

 
儘管如此,阿迪斯阿貝巴大學的電腦專家還是取得若干成就。最近,他們發展出一套系統,可供阿比西尼亞語族群傳送文字簡訊,這在衣國還是一種時髦玩意。 (取材自紐約時報)

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