Languages, Part 4
Google
Translate
In 2013, “Google Translate”
would translate text from and to the following languages:
These languages are
71 in number, and they include only one indigenous African language: Swahili.
In 2014, the number
of languages on the “Google Translate” list has increased to 81, but still
there is only the one indigenous African language on the list: Swahili.
The advent of free,
online, automatic translation services is a great boon and a help to people a
lot of the time. In our continent, where hundreds of languages are spoken, it
opens the prospect of people being able to communicate much better than before
across language barriers, if they have written text.
Printed text can be scanned
and rendered into digital text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Once
in that form it can be translate by Google Translate or by similar software.
But none of this works
for Africans, within Africa, if only one African language is available.
Whereas automatic
translation is in general progressive, the absence of indigenous African
languages works regressively for these languages. It means, at this stage, that
the selected, languages are even more privileged than before, and the African
languages relatively even more disadvantaged than before. The “playing field”
of automatic translation is less level than before.
Machine translation
Computer translation
is a great assistance, but it is not perfect. Computer translation has to be
corrected, because it always contains errors, and serious errors at that.
Computer translation
assists because it quickly gives you a draft to work on.
To correct, you must
apply your own knowledge of the languages, or use an old-fashioned dictionary,
or the computer equivalent of an old-fashioned dictionary.
Translation is an
art. Computer translation cannot complete the artistic function of the
translator.
South Africans have
not come to terms with translation, yet. This is not only true in terms of the
eleven official languages, and other languages spoken in South Africa, but also
in terms of international languages used in other parts of Africa such as
French, Portuguese, Arabic, and Swahili.
This becomes at some
point a political problem, because politics relies on communication, so that
anything that inhibits communication can have a political effect.
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