News Archive / Slow translation affecting product uptake in local languages 15.07.2010

Lack of agreed language terms, the slow pace of translation and lack of technical expertise have greatly stunted the development of software in local African languages. Many African languages are not documented and most technology terms such as mouse, phishing and malware, among others, do not exist in African languages, which has hampered the development process.

Microsoft, Google and Facebook are some of the global brands that have translated their products into local languages for use by communities that may not be conversant with English or prefer to use their local languages.

In its quest to reach more people, Microsoft is developing products in more than 60 African languages under the Local Language Program. Microsoft has probably faced the biggest challenge in its translation projects -- its products are available in eight African languages, but the products are never translated in a timely way for use by the community. "Lack of local localization experience has affected Microsoft. Even if partners have translation experience, they are not always familiar with the languages, localization practices and tools. It takes time for Microsoft to train and manage these skills," said Mark Matunga, citizenship manager, Microsoft Eastern and Southern Africa.

Google has managed to escape the headache of slow translation projects by using machine translation for searches and Suggest, which is integrated within other Google global projects. Google recently launched Ethiopic transliteration in Suggest. "Most state-of-the-art, commercial machine-translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars," said Google UK's Taylor. However, automatic translation is considered very difficult because the meaning of words depends on the context in which they are used, as well as the structure and rules of a language. For instance, some words are similar but different in meaning. "While machine translation is not yet perfect, we believe that the current quality of machine translation is sufficient for many users to obtain a gist understanding of content in other languages -- and over time, our automatic translations will get better," added Taylor.

While more and more Africans are expected to get online, the literacy levels are still slow and access to local content in local languages will be vital. Most of the content online, whether via PCs or mobiles, is still in English and French, which are the dominant Western languages in Africa.

source: http://www.computerworld.co.ke

 

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