A research project called Decolonise Science plans to translate 180 scientific papers from the AfricArXiv into 6 African languages:
- isiZulu and Northern Sotho from southern Africa
- Hausa and Yoruba from West Africa
- Luganda and Amharic from East Africa
Masakhane is the grassroots organisation behind Decolonise Science (Masakhane roughly translates to “We build together” in isiZulu) and their overall aim is to “strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans”.
Despite the fact that 2000 of the world’s languages are African, African languages are barely represented in technology. The tragic past of colonialism has been devastating for African languages in terms of their support, preservation and integration. This has resulted in technological space that does not understand our names, our cultures, our places, our history.
Masakhane’s mission
(via Nature.com)
Filed under: Africa education linguistics natural language processing people of colour