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.
By 2015 the total
had increased to 90 languages, of which 9 are indigenous African languages,
namely Chichewa (Nyanja), Hausa, Igbo, Malagasy, Sesotho, Somali, Swahili,
Yoruba and Zulu.
Lingala is not there,
Kinyarwanda is not there, Wolof is not there, Amharic is not there, Gikuyu and
Dholuo are not there. Hundreds of African languages remain to be included.
The advent of free,
online, automatic translation services is a great boon and a help to people. In
our continent, where so many 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.
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 the
draft, you must apply your own knowledge of the languages, or use an
old-fashioned dictionary, or else 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 so, 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. Anything
that inhibits communication can have a political effect.
