https://archive.org/details/ngugi-lol

The Language of Languages: Reflections on Translation by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Topics
#translation, #literarytranslation, #linguistics, #sociolinguistics, #colonialism, #Africanlanguages, #PanAfricanism, #languagepolicy, #languagepolicies

With clear, conversational prose, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writings on translation.

Through his many critically acclaimed novels, stories, essays, plays, and memoirs, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has been at the forefront of world literature for decades. He has also been, in his own words, “a language warrior,” fighting for indigenous African languages to find their rightful place in the literary world. Having begun his writing career in English, Ngũgĩ shifted to writing in his native language Gikũyũ in 1977, a stance both creatively and politically significant. For decades now, Ngũgĩ has been translating his Gikũyũ works into English himself, and he has used many platforms to champion the practice and cause of literary translations, which he calls “the language of languages.”

https://archive.org/details/awing-english

Awing - English Dictionary and English - Awing Index by Alomofor Christian

Topics
#Mbɨ́ɨwiŋə, #Awing, #Mbwewi, #Cameroon, #Kamerun, #bilingualdictionary, #bilingualdictionaries, #translationdictionary, #translationdictionaries, #Africanlanguages, #indigenouslanguages, #languagesofCameroon, #languagesofKamerun, #languagesofAfrica

CABTAL (Cameroon Association for Bible Translation and Literacy), Yaoundé.

https://archive.org/details/indigenous-languages-of-cameroon

Indigenous Languages of Cameroon by Emmanuel N. Chia

Topics
#Cameroon, #Kamerun, #linguistics, #sociolinguistics, #Africanlanguages, #Africanlinguistics, #languagesofCameroon, #languagesofKamerun, #indigenouslanguages, #indigenouslinguistics

Paper is undated; the most recent citations within are dated 1981.

Today's to-do list at the Interpreters' Co-op...

- write to an agency about #africanlanguages
- finalize contracts and start composing a letter about them
- arrange to be on the radio
- consider a national gathering of interpreter co-ops

Today's to-do list at the Interpreters' Co-op...

- register with the state of Minnesota as a (potential) vendor
- prepare to sign a thick contract with the county to be even more official than we already are
- keep looking for #africanlanguages

Can people engage in debates about digitisation using indigenous languages? How does linguistic colonialism manifest itself in digital technologies? What are the implications of digital platform use for the future of African languages?

Looking forward to this online event on "African languages and technological transformations: debating knowledge, rights and power on a digital continent":
http://kingsdh.net/2023/02/23/africa-week/

#digitalhumanities #digitalculture #digitalrights #platformstudies #colonialism #linguisticcolonialism #decolonisation #language #africanlanguages #commodon #mediastudies #internetstudies #africaweek

https://archive.org/details/ocean-of-letters

Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora by Pier M. Larson

Topics
#IndianOcean, #history, #Africanhistory, #historyofAfrica, #Madagascar, #Comoros, #theComoros, #SouthAfrica, #Azania, #Malagasydiaspora, #Malagasy, #Africanliterature, #literatureofAfrica, #imperialism, #colonialism, #antiblackness, #slavery, #slavetrade, #blackchattelslavery, #linguistics, #sociolinguistics, #Africanlanguages, #languagesofAfrica

My latest paper, on the state of the art and prospects for bootstrapping NLP tools across African languages (Niger-Congo B ones, more specifically) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.12027.pdf and relevant to #EMNLP2022 that I’m attending now
#nlp #bootstrapping #africanlanguages

A new article on surface realization architectures for natural language generation: a review of 77 systems categorised into 6 main types, and a new architecture, written with my graduating student Dr. Zola Mahlaza as the main author. It’s in the print queue at the ACM TALLIP journal.
Brief blog post: https://keet.wordpress.com/2022/10/24/a-review-of-nlg-realizers-and-a-new-architecture/
Direct link to the (free access) article: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3567594
#nlg #surfaceRealisers #naturalLanguageGeneration #AfricanLanguages #TALLIP

#Lanfrica aims to curate #AfricanLanguage resources. https://lanfrica.com

#AfricanLanguages

Call for papers

Third workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Language (RAIL) https://www.sadilar.org/index.php/en/2-general/329-third-workshop-on-resources-for-african-indigenous-language-rail

Suggested topics include the following:
* Digital representations of linguistic structures
* Descriptions of corpora or other data sets of African indigenous languages
* Building resources for (under resourced) African indigenous languages
* Developing and using African indigenous languages in the digital age...

#AfricanIndigenousLanguages #DigitallySmallLanguages #AfricanLanguages

The seventh conference on Machine Translation, #WMT22,

has a "Shared Task": Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for [24] African Languages https://statmt.org/wmt22/large-scale-multilingual-translation-task.html

"We do so by introducing a high quality benchmark, paired with a fair and rigorous evaluation procedure."

#MachineTranslation #AfricanLanguages #LowResourceLanguages