For Hillary Clinton\u2019s latest trip to Africa, she probably didn\u2019t need to take along many translators or interpreters. Maybe just a French speaker. Of the nine countries on her itinerary, seven are considered Anglophone and two Francophone.<\/p>\n
That, of course, does not tell the whole story\u2014far from it. In one of those Anglophone countries, Nigeria, more than 500 languages are spoken.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s mainly the elite who speak these colonial languages. In Uganda, it\u2019s English, in Senegal, French, in Mozambique, Portuguese. But most people\u2014especially outside the big cities\u2014don\u2019t understand those languages.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a huge problem for aid agencies trying to get the word out about disease prevention. The brochures, leaflets and posters they distribute tend to be written in those colonial languages.<\/p>\n
Lori Thicke,\u00a0who runs Translators without Borders, told me that she\u2019s visited villages in Africa where you can find a plentiful supply of brochures about AIDS prevention. Many contain technical and sensitive information: how to practise safe sex, how to use a condom. But because the brochures are in written in European languages, it\u2019s often the case that that the not a single villager understands them.<\/p>\n
I also talked with\u00a0Nataly Kelly\u00a0of translation industry research group Common Sense Advisory. She co-authored a\u00a0report\u00a0for Translators without Borders on the state of the translation industry in Africa. You can hear our conversation in the podcast. The bottom line is that, aside from South Africa, no sub-Saharan African nation has much of a translation industry.<\/p>\n
There are signs of change. Some African nations are starting to promote their indigenous languages. There\u2019s a debate in Ghana about replacing English as the official language, or augmenting it, with one or more of the more prominent local languages.<\/p>\n
The problem is, none of those local languages is spoken across Ghana. They\u2019re regional, and so adopting one of those as the official language would give the impression of favoring a single linguistic and ethnic group.<\/p>\n
In South Africa, there are eleven official languages That\u2019s helped with the status of some of the less widely spoken ones, like Ndebele and Venda. It means that some official documents must be published in those languages. That raises their status and has spawned a translation industry\u2014something that barely exists around minority languages elsewhere in Africa.<\/p>\n
Many Africans speak two or more languages. In Cameroon, it\u2019s not uncommon to find people who speak four or five languages. That\u2019s led some outsiders to assume that Africa doesn\u2019t have a translation deficit. But it does. Speaking a second language doesn\u2019t automatically make you a translator.<\/p>\n
You need training to be able to translate. You also need tools: dictionaries and glossaries of technical terms. And you need to be online to access them.<\/p>\n
Translators without Borders has started a training program for translators in Kenya\u2019s capital, Nairobi. They\u2019ve begun with Swahili. It\u2019s the closest Africa has to its own link language, spoken now by an estimated 40 million people.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a Translators without Borders project that connects volunteer translators with Wikipedia and local mobile phone operators. The idea is to translate Wikipedia articles on AIDS, malaria and the like into local languages, and then make them accessible on people\u2019s phones.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s slow-going: Translators without Borders has only a handful of volunteers who know those African languages.<\/p>\n
By Patrick Cox<\/strong><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"