Languages, Part 5a
Arabic,
Portuguese, French, English
The map above, found via Google Images, was labelled
“Business Languages in Africa”. There are no indigenous African languages
mentioned. All are exotic languages, except that Ethiopia’s language is
referred to as “Other”. Kiswahili is ignored.
Tactics
What one can note is two things. The first is immediate and
tactical, pointing to practical necessity in politics, as much as in business.
This is the practical necessity for South Africa, if it is
to have an effective political relationship with the rest of the continent, to
have good translation into English from French, Arabic and Portuguese, and vice
versa.
This means a cadre force of translators who are not
politically neutral, but who are editors in their own right, and capable of
discriminating and selecting from the available material.
Similarly, these translators need to be at work translating
South African material into those other languages, and publishing it by all
available means.
So that the net result is a continuous two-way flow of ideas
and dialogue between SA and the rest of the continent.
Strategy
The second matter is to note the dominance of the languages
of previous colonists, and to put in place measures that will inexorably work
to turn this situation around.
What are these measures?
As South Africans, we have to begin at home. We have to have
dictionaries in all of our languages. That is, monolingual dictionaries. The
movement towards an inter-lingual communication begins with the consolidation
of the individual languages. Otherwise, the colonisers’ languages will continue
to dominate, as a strong mediator between weak indigenous languages.
With that groundwork of dictionaries in place, then a
superstructure of translation has to be created. Even if it is technically
sophisticated, it will still be labour-intensive. That is to say, output will
be in direct proportion to human effort applied. This is the paradox of IT. The
more it becomes frictionless by computerisation, the more direct is the
relationship between human input and practical output.
That means that there need to be plenty of linguists. Modern
language departments at universities need to grow enormously. The number of
academics needs to increase or even multiply, as well as the numbers of
students.
Africans need to own the language business of Africa. The
map has to look different. The whole concept has to change.
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