Specialised translators will, with the use of artificial intelligence software, be used in a groundbreaking project to make highly technical and scientific research papers available to millions of people across Africa in indigenous languages.
The Decolonise Science project, which will work with language boards across Africa, will translate 180 research papers from English, the dominant language used in scientific papers in Africa.
The papers, to be made available through open-source websites, will primarily aid first-year university students.
Part of the project will be the creation of a data set that includes a glossary of technical terms, words and phrases.
Run by a team of computer scientists, science communicators, archivists and linguists, the project, which launches this week, aims to translate science, technology, mathematics and social science papers into six indigenous African languages.
The chosen languages are isiZulu, Northern Sotho, Yoruba, Hausa, Luganda and Amharic, which the project organisers say are collectively spoken by 80-million people.
Yoruba and Hausa are western African languages, while Luganda and Amharic are spoken in the continent’s Great Lakes region and eastern Africa.
The project will be run through grassroots organisation Masakhane, ScienceLink and academia archive company AfricArxiv, said project manager Tajuddeen Gwadabe.
Gwadabe, a computer scientist, said such an endeavour was critical to ensuring the dissemination and understanding of knowledge.
“Most people think and learn in their mother tongue. Because teaching, especially at universities in Africa, is done mainly in English, it becomes incredibly difficult for people, whose mother tongue is not English, to internalise and conceptualise what they are taught.
“These translations will help with the progress of thinking, bridge knowledge gaps and greatly improve the understanding of highly complex scientific and mathematical issues.”
Artificial intelligence systems would be used to aid the translators.
Gwadabe said the difficulties they expected to encounter were around terminologies, “which we have to make sure are acceptable to different language groups.
“The AI systems will aid the translators by giving them various options. Another challenge has been finding translators who have an excellent understanding of the subjects chosen for translation. From our pilot programme, which starts [this] week, we will know exactly how many translators we need.
“Because translations are into six very different languages we are working with various language institutions. As the project progresses we will look at possibly translating the papers into other African languages. The languages were chosen from some of those most widely spoken in Africa.”
He said translations would be made available through open-source websites predominantly to first-year university students.
“Other researchers will also have access to them and be able to make contributions.”
Sibusiso Biyela, digital science communicator at Johannesburg science communication company ScienceLink, said the project was important “because at the moment research papers were mostly only in English”.
He said lots of scientific work was done in Africa but not written in African languages.
“We want African languages to capture the knowledge of science and to take part in knowledge gathering so researchers can have an understanding of these topics for problem solving.
“The benefits of learning in your mother tongue are immense.”
Biyela said with the Covid-19 pandemic there had been great difficulties in explaining the disease and its impact.
“That’s because of the reality that many scientific words and terms either don’t exist or are very limited in many African languages.
“Often in school as a child is taught English. They also learn about science, but in English having little grasp of the terminology or meaning of complex words. For English speakers science can be complicated. You can imagine how complicated it becomes for second language English speakers.”
He said language was closely linked to culture.
“If your culture cannot talk about science, then, by association you feel your culture is unable to take part in scientific discussion, with one left thinking their language and culture are less important than others.”
He said a foreseen challenge was ensuring the adoption and acceptance of words and terms.
“That is why we are working with language boards to ensure the legitimacy of the glossaries.”
Biyela said selected papers included those covering basic sciences, mathematics, engineering and social sciences that dealt directly with communities.
“This project is groundbreaking in that nothing to this translation extent has ever been done before in Africa. Its impact will be remarkable. We finally will have words and terms like planets or umhambi [wanderer in isiZulu] or dinosaur [isilwane sasemandulo in isiZulu], which never existed before in languages.”
AfricArxiv’s co-founder Johanna Havemann and strategic manager Johanssen Obanda said: “By providing access to research outcomes in regional languages, this initiative will facilitate science literacy across multiple sectors in African societies, such as health, education, economics and also policymaking.
“It will also help foster indigenous knowledge and allow for collaboration between researchers and indigenous communities,” said Obanda.
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