aNewDomain.net — Open source developers are working to make the online community more inclusive — by putting endangered spoken and written languages online. Here's how they're doing it. Our Madison Andrews reports.
Of the 6,000 languages currently spoken today, UNESCO estimates that approximately half will be extinct by the end of this century—that's 3,000 languages. Gone. But thanks to the work of people like Kara Andrade and Kevin Scannell, some of those languages will survive and even thrive in the digital age.
Kara Andrade, Kevin Scannell, Maite Goni, and Peter Rohloff at SXSWi panel Indigenous Tweets: Visible Voices & Technology.
It's an eye-opening question, and one that Andrade hopes more people will begin to seriously consider. At a SXSWi session called Indigenous Tweets: Visible Voices & Technology, she and a panel of experts discussed how they are using tech to make the Internet more inclusive. Kevin Scannell, an MIT graduate and professor at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, said open source software is key.
It took Scannell about a year to translate the Mozilla browser into Irish Gaelic. And that's a language with an extensive written tradition.
Some indigenous languages are spoken languages only, so translating them for use online is an enormous hurdle. Take Chichewa. More than seven million people in Malawi speak it. The linguistic hurdles of translating a browser for such an all-oral language are daunting. You literally have to invent new words to describe basic online functions.
There's no technological impediment for that solution, Scannell says. The main problem? A lack of coordinated funding. All four of the Indigenous Tweets panel participants—those included Maite Goni, who is working to revitalize Basque culture through digital literacy education, and Peter Rohloff, who is developing translations of indigenous Guatemalan languages—said public non-profits like the National Science Foundation (NSF) were funding their work.
In HablaCentro's case, the hardware was readily available. Nearly everyone in Central America owns a cell phone. So implementing a mobile, Android-based citizen journalism project was a matter of creating the translation software, then providing the journalistic training to indigenous speakers so they could share their stories online.
"My ultimate goal is that there's an incredible local journalism process with a product that is locally delivered and creates employment opportunities for people — so you don't have to have journalists parachuting in from the US who have no clue about the reality of each country," said Andrade.
That process has already been realized in five Central American countries—Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Venezuela and El Salvador. Still, the so-what factor seems remarkably under-discussed in the English-speaking community.
Some argue that it's important to preserve endangered languages for the linguistic value they add to cognitive language research, while others fear an undifferentiated, Anglo-dominated mono-culture. But Scannell feels that what we stand to lose is nothing compared to the cultural loss of the communities themselves—their heritage, their tradition, their very identity.
Translating social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook is especially important, because if young people perceive that the Internet is an English-language medium, they're less likely to pass on the language to their children. Scannell has translated Facebook into several languages using open source software. In fact, Facebook actually has a translation tool kit similar to Mozilla's, but they've capped their supported translations at 100 due to quality control issues.
Google.org launched a project last year called Endangered Languages that is, in its own words, "an online collaborative effort to protect linguistic diversity." It enables people to upload photos, video, and text in their own languages.
But being able to actually use online tools like Google Search or Google+ would carry significantly more symbolic value for people who feel disenfranchised from the online community.
What remains to be seen is whether big software companies like Facebook and Google can find a financial incentive for supporting indigenous languages, and the developers working to revitalize them.
Great article Madison. I hope you follow this up with more on the subject — there are a lot of important questions on the borderline between the benefits of technology and the oppressiveness of a mono-cultural web that deserve much more coverage than they get in the average tech rag.