Kwa hukumu hii ya makala, mimi alitumia uwezo mwezi Google Translate kutafsiri kati ya Kiingereza na Kiswahili, ambayo ni jambo kuu.
That may have been complete gibberish, but it's an option that wasn't available just a few days ago on Google Translate which allows one to translate to and from Swahili or Afrikaans to all of the other languages that were already available. I wrote a bit more about this here for those interested. But here, we just wanted to announce that because of this change, the Maneno Translation Assistant is now able to help out with translations between Swahili to English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. This is the first local African language to gain this ability and we welcome it with great thanks.
It's been in the works for the last two months as we coordinated the translation work from the very adept Mr. Oumar Bah, who now blogs (in French and Fula) at Konngol Afirik. And now, we're happy to announce that the Fula language version is live on Maneno! It's the 'FUL' option at the top for those who may know the language via a different spelling, such as 'Peul' in French.
Fula (or Fulfulde as it is known in the language) is spoken primarily in West Africa with around 16 million speakers or so according to Wikipedia. Although, it is the case that the amount of speakers could be as high as 50 million, as a commenter mentioned below. Given the number of dialects and the spread of the language, hard, fast numbers are hard to come by, but it is generally assumed that the Wikipedia article is far too conservative in its total.
The amount of countries that this language is spoken in to at least some extent is massive (take a look to the left), which is why we're very happy to have it as a language interface option. We hope that there will be a far reach with this language as Oumar is extremely well-versed in the Fula language mechanics. He compiled the first Fula-French online dictionary, which he is also looking to publish.
If you look at this language version of Maneno, you can see that there are similar issues as with the Bambara version in that there are a a number of characters which are outside the typical ones in the extended Latin alphabet. These should all have native supported on the internet, but that can support can sometimes be lacking. Thankfully, due to the Bambara experience, this was much less of a problem this time around, although Internet Explorer 6 simply will not display these characters, so upgrade if you can.
Again, we thank Oumar for all his work as well as Claire Ulrich who worked to connect us with Oumar in the first place.
We've had it up and running for some time now, but we're happy to officially state that the Bambara version of Maneno is now fully functional. This is all due to the ongoing work of Boukary Konate in Mali. He has toiled constantly on this version to make it work and we thank him a great deal for it.
It hasn't been easy to get this working. Earlier, we wrote about the problems in implementing this language interface. If it hadn't been for the SIL keyboard, it just wouldn't have been possible. And this is a shame really as there is no reason for this character set not to work.
One other nasty thing we discovered is that the Bambara characters simply will not work on version 6 of Internet Explorer. This is bad as around 20% of the Maneno traffic uses that browser and as Boukary found out, a great many of the computers in Bamako still use this browser that was originally released in 2001 and has been a kick in the face to web developers ever since. Explorer 7 and 8 are fine as are any versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. Leave it up to Microsoft to ruin the party...
If you happen to be visiting Bamako anytime soon, bring a new copy of Firefox to install anywhere you find a machine dragging along with IE6. It'll make life a lot easier from a linguistic point of view. Otherwise, take a look at the Bambara version of Maneno. Hopefully it will reach out to more native speakers of the language and open up access to get more of the language online as opposed to just French or English.
Last year, when Maneno was in the early stages of planning, we had the pleasure of attending the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 in Budapest, Hungary. It was a glorious series of days talking and interacting with people from around the world who are heavily invested in citizen journalism in some form or another. While the topics were broad and many impressively stuck out, there were a number of comments from those involved in the translation efforts of Global Voices Lingua.
During the sessions, we had heard from people at Google who worked in the machine translation section, as well as other people working to make language translation an automated event. This is all well and good, but given the heuristics and methods we have currently, it is simply never as good as a human translator. To those representing these technology initiatives, the human translators raised the issue of, "Why is it that all new translation technology attempts to replace the human translator as opposed to augment what they do?"
If I recall, there wasn't too much said from the speakers, but my own personal reaction to this is that because a great deal of the technology is created in the United States, which is an inherently monolingual society, you get this general approach. Working between two, three, or even four languages on a daily basis is not a common occurrence, so it's beyond the horizons of most companies and developers in the country. Thus, the reason for attempting to bypass the problem with technology altogether as opposed to trying to improve the situation at hand.
Google does have some mighty useful tools though when taken in the frame of reference that they are machine translation and not to create entire translations. That being the case, we've made some large changes to our translation system on Maneno. A big, noticeable change is that we've streamlined the translation composition page even more. Those translators we heard talked about having a simple, side by side page where they can easily work on the translation. We've worked to make this possible and think that what we have is getting quite good, although we're always open to feedback on it.
The other noticeable change is the addition of what we're calling the 'Translation Assistant'. This is a very simple window you can open on the translation page that interacts directly with the Google Translate API. It's there in case trying to remember a couple of words from the source article is just not happening and a translator wants to do a quick lookup in the target language. The Assistant is not there for translating entire articles, but just as an aid to a human translator as it should be.
We were also working to embed Google's Translate Gadget as well. This would be in case you're viewing an article that is only in French, but maybe you only speak Swedish or Chinese. By using the Gadget, you'd then be able to get a better-than-nothing machine translation in to your language. The issue was that putting it on pages was confusing and took away from the whole purpose of our translation system, which is to make it easier to have human translators write proper translations of articles in order to link between the language sphere silos. The code is ready to go and we'd still like to include it, so if anyone has any feedback, leave a comment or contact us directly to give your thoughts on what you think would work best.
Otherwise, happy translating and we hope that these aids make the transition between languages an enjoyable one.
In constantly striving to create a more accessible platform, we at Maneno are always on the lookout for new languages to make the site available in because let's face it, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish versions are great, but we feel that the true strength of the site will be having the native languages of Africa available as well. Because of that, there is the Swahili version and soon (hopefully very soon) we will have a version in Bambara. In case you haven't heard of this language, let me assure you that this is not an April Fool's. This is a West African language that is spoken by around 2-3 million people. Naturally, it doesn't have a strong online presence, but we're hoping that this can change in the future because of efforts like this. I mean, if Slovenian, which is spoken by 2.4 million people can have a Wikipedia with over 100,000 entries, why not Bambara?
When it comes to integrating African languages in a website, one such as Swahili is overall, rather easy to implement. It uses a strictly English, Latin alphabet for the base of its characters. Bambara however gets considerably more complex. There are a number of characters which are in addition to the Latin base such as ɛ, ɔ, and ɲ (or ŋ depending on the dialect.) Typing these characters is a problem because there is no native support in Windows or the Mac OS.
By way of my pain, I would just like to point people to Sil, a group which has created a keyboard for Bambara and other languages, albeit a keyboard that is only for Windows machines. That takes care of the typing. There is still the issue of the displaying. For that, you need to encode your pages as UTF-8 which amazingly, actually supports these characters, although possibly not in every font for the web, so your kilometerage may vary. There is also the issue that any translation file needs to be created, from the start as a Unicode file. Regular files will just end up mashing up the extended characters.
That is a quick overview of the problems. I hope that it helps others who might be trying to do something similar with Bambara or other languages on the web. Obviously, once we launch this version of the site, you can be sure that we'll let everyone know about it as we think it will be pretty darned cool to have!
A couple of weeks ago we announced the Beta release of Maneno after a month of frantically working of a lot of small details that needed refining. And while Beta is still a work-in-progress, we are fastly progressing on a better functionality of the site and on translating the whole platform in a bunch of languages.
Today we are extremely happy to announce the Kiswahili and French versions of Maneno, which we hope will become two of the most popular languages of choice of Maneno users in Sub-Saharan Africa.
For the Kiswahili site we have to thank profusely our dear friend Deogratias Simba, based in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), for translating everything into his mother language in such a generous way. We'll tell you more about him soon, since he's not only a professional translator and an editor with his own publishing house, but also an author and a terrific blogger in Swahili.
The French translation was done by ourselves, so please get in touch with us if you find misspellings or inaccuracies as it is bound to happen.
And if anyone is interested in translating Maneno in other languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa, even very small ones, we would be very proud to add more versions to the site. So again, please get in touch so we can give you more details!
