Language Science And Language Technology In Africa

This book provides a broad overview of current work on South African languages, language resources and language technologies. While it provides a fairly comprehensive overview, it also ties together the most recent knowledge state here, and is therefore truly innovative ? The book is therefore informed by current international trends in the respective fields of science, and feeds back into them ? There is absolutely no doubt that the book has an academic peer audience and is directed at specialists in the field. - Prof. Axel Fleisch, University of Helsinki, Finland

With increasing numbers of computers and diffusion of the internet around the world, localisation of the technology, and the content it carries, into the many languages people speak is becoming an ever more important area for discussion and action. Localisation, simply put, includes translation and cultural adaptation of user interfaces and software applications, as well as the creation and translation of internet content in diverse languages. It is essential in making information and communication technology more accessible to the populations of the poorer countries, increasing its relevance to their lives, needs, and aspirations, and ultimately in bridging the 'digital divide'.

This book challenges the view that digital communication in Africa is limited and relatively unsophisticated and questions the assumption that digital communication has a damaging effect on indigenous African languages. The book applies the principles of Digital African Multilingualism (DAM) in which there are no rigid boundaries between languages. The book charts a way forward for African languages where greater attention is paid to what speakers do with the languages rather than what the languages look like, and offers several models for language policy and planning based on horizontal and user-based multilingualism. The chapters demonstrate how digital communication is being used to form and sustain communication in many kinds of online groups, including for political activism and creating poetry, and offer a paradigm of language merging online that provides a practical blueprint for the decolonization of African languages through digital platforms.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2017, held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2017. The 26 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. The papers selected to this volume belong to various fields of: Language Resources, Tools and Evaluation, Less-Resourced-Languages, Speech Processing, Morphology, Computational Semantics, Machine Translation, and Information Retrieval and Information Extraction.

This innovative handbook takes a fresh look at the currently underestimated linguistic diversity of Africa, the continent with the largest number of languages in the world. It covers the major domains of linguistics, offering both a representative picture of Africa’s linguistic landscape as well as new and at times unconventional perspectives. The focus is not so much on exhaustiveness as on the fruitful relationship between African and general linguistics and the contributions the two domains can make to each other. This volume is thus intended for readers with a specific interest in African languages and also for students and scholars within the greater discipline of linguistics.

With increasing numbers of computers and penetration of the Internet around the world, localization of the technology and the content it carries into the many languages people speak is becoming an ever more important area for discussion and action. Localization, simply put, includes translation and cultural adaptation of user interfaces and software applications, as well as creation and translation of internet content in diverse languages. It is essential in making information and communication technology more accessible to the populations of the poorer countries, increasing its relevance to their lives, needs, and aspirations, and ultimately in bridging the digital divide.A Localization is a new and growing field of inquiry. This book identifies issues, concerns, priorities, and lines of research and is intended as a baseline study in defining localization in the African context and how it is important for development and education in the long term. THE AUTHOR Don Osborn is the Founder of the Bisharat Language, Technology & Development Initiative. He is a former Associate Director for Agriculture, Peace Corps, Niger, and led the PanAfrican Localisation project from 2005 to 2008."