Archive for the ‘Afrikaans’ Category

How many South African languages are there?

Posted on July 8th, 2012by Michelle
In Afrikaans, Indigenous languages, Language acquisition | Leave a Comment »

Can you guess?

If you guessed 11, you’d be right. The 11 official languages of South Africa are: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu. Many countries have just one or two official languages (or in the USA, none at all). Some official languages are regulated by an authority, such as France’s Académie Française. South Africa’s languages are overseen by the government department PanSALB (Pan South African Language Board).

It seems that PanSALB hasn’t been too successful though, with the Economist reporting that it is underfunded and accused of being corrupt and mismanaged. So what’s the answer?

The Use of Official Languages Bill, introduced early this year, seeks to get government institutions using the native African languages more, alongside English and Afrikaans. But as South Africa has learned with PanSALB, implementation is the hard part. To improve, South African officials might see a model in India, whose 23 recognised languages—the most in the world—have found support in the respected Sahitya Akademi, the national academy of letters….

South African languages may too find greater support in groups founded and run by native speakers themselves, bottom-up and not top-down. The government might not have the resources or emotional investment to properly preserve and promote all of South Africa’s official languages. But at least the law gives all 11 languages equality in theory. Perhaps it’s time for indigenous language communities to make them more equal in fact. (Source: Economist)

World Cup Language

Posted on June 10th, 2010by Michelle
In Afrikaans, English, Hints and Tips, Slang | 2 Comments »

With the football World Cup starting tomorrow, it’s time to take a look at some South African slang.

The slang is taken from South Africa’s 11 different languages, which all have constitutionally guaranteed equal status. These languages reflect the diversity of the country, and are:

Afrikaans
English
IsiNdebele
IsiXhosa
IsiZulu
Sepedi
Sesotho
Setswana
SiSwati
Tshivenda
Xitsonga

In addition a number of other languages are spoken including Khoi, Nama and San languages, sign language, and some indigenous creoles and pidgins.

Here are some examples of slang – I particularly like ‘chips! Chips!’:

Babbelas (bub-a-lars). Hangover – usually rather a bad one. From the isiZulu word for hangover isibhabhalazi. “Hello, hello. Great party last night. How’s your head? Are you a bit babbelas?”

Bra (brah) or bru. Nothing to do with underwear at all, but an informal term for “my friend” or “mate”, deriving from “brother”. ‘He’s my bra but that team he supports is rubbish.” Bru stems from the Afrikaans for brother, broer.

Chips! Chips!. Nothing you’ll find in the kebab shop around the corner but an expression of alarm or warning. “Chips! Chips! He’s off-side”

(Source: The Guardian)

Computers vs. humans

Posted on October 20th, 2009by Michelle
In Afrikaans, Hints and Tips, Language acquisition, Technology, Translation, Yiddish | 1 Comment »

Computer brain vs human brainOK, that sounds a little ominous, but it’s not the end of the world as we know it (yet).

Whilst learning a language, there are many resources we can use. A good resource should be accurate and reliable. That’s why you need to be careful when using translation websites.

Google Translate for example, currently has around 50 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish. Google uses something called statistical machine translation, which is useful for getting the general idea of documents, but may not be completely accurate.

Pros and cons: Google’s computerized approach means it can translate tons of content — and fast. But computers aren’t quite up to speed with ever-evolving modern speech, so reports of translation errors are fairly common.

On the plus side, the service has been vastly improved in the last five years, Och said. Also, Google lets people spot translation errors, suggest new wordings and translate its interface into languages Google’s computers don’t speak just yet. (Source: CNN.com)

Sites such as Babelfish and freetranslation.com offer a similar service to Google Translate, and again are machine powered. Freetranslation.com also offers human translation, but at a cost. So when translating a specific phrase, it’s a good idea to double check the translation – perhaps try cross-translating it into the original language.

The popular social networking site Facebook, however, has a different method. Through crowdsourcing, they are translating their site into different languages using human knowledge.

Pros and cons: People are good at knowing idioms and slang, so Facebook tends to get these right, but there are limited numbers of multi-lingual volunteers who want to spend time helping Facebook translate things.

Also, Facebook’s site is available in many languages, but its human translators don’t touch wall posts, photo comments and other user-submitted items, which is a big con if you want to have friends who don’t share a common language with you. People who use Facebook Connect to translate their sites can choose which text they want users to help translate, according to Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich.

What are your experiences of using Google Translate, Facebook and other machine translators? Do you find them more or less helpful than human translation?