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Of interest to these languages is the championing of terms such as those found
in the Egyptian copyright law that give authors 3 years in which to exercise
their right to translate. If they fail to translate their work into Arabic within
that time then anyone may translate their work into Arabic. This simple clause
could dramatically stimulate the production of content in local languages.
Choosing Closer Languages
Linguistically speaking English is very far from either of the languages, Xhosa
and Zulu. Xhosa and Zulu are both part of the Nguni language group in South
Africa and are therefore linguistically closely related.
Many efforts to use machine translation focus on the long distance translation
of English to Zulu, French to Zulu or similar. While we won’t discount the
value of these it is worth considering that by machine translating from Zulu
to Xhosa we grow a 10 million strong community into an 18 million strong
community.
There is an unexploited strength in these close communities that goes beyond
machine translation. Zulu is a Bantu language and so is Swahili. Swahili has
an estimated 140 million speakers. It is much easier to translate content from
Swahili to Zulu. And by translation in this case we don’t only mean machine
translation, we mean human translation as well as the fact that the closer
alignment of the cultures makes translation of cultural metaphors so much
easier.
For marginalised and minority language we really should be examining how we
can exploit the closer relationships to grow the language speaking community,
grow the financial viability of languages and grow the limited resources by the
pooling of resources.
Journey
Our efforts are part of a journey. Travellers share their meager possessions, but
we in the language community are not very good at sharing our resources.
When it comes to sharing, the creation of open linguistic data seems to be most
critical. Resource rich languages can afford not to share because ultimately
there are enough resources available. But resource poor languages have to
share. But even in the act of sharing we have witnessed resource poor languages
creating open resources that could not be combined or could not be used in
open source applications. These situations prevented open resource sharing.
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