Translation Africa Blog - September 2014
Ghana Sees Calls for Local Languages in Schools
22/09/2014The Ghanian Minister for Education has stated schools should turn to Ghana’s local languages as the language of instruction in the country’s primary schools. Her opinion is backed up by the head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Ghana, who blames social media on the bad school results of the Ghanian youth….
More Info
Will African Economic Success Lead to Language Extinction?
19/09/2014Alarming news from the BBC! No matter how great economic success might sound, new research has found it severely influences the languages spoken in a country. According to an article written by Rebecca Morelle, new research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B revealed that in the most developed regions of the world,…
More Info
Hausa Language Given Boost by BBC
16/09/2014Good news for Hausa speakers – the BBC has announced that they will start to broadcast a news programme in the West African language. The programme will take the form of 10-minute weekday bulletins. This will be the first time anywhere that an international broadcaster is going to air in the language. Hausa is spoken…
More Info
African Language Teaching Introduced in South African Schools
15/09/2014Next year, close to 4,000 schools in South Africa will start African language classes in grade 1. This decision has been made based on a pilot project that ran in schools this year. In South Africa, the Department of Basic Education’s Incremental Introduction of African Languages (IIAL) has recently announced an interesting new programme that…
More Info
The Top 20 Languages in Nigeria
09/09/2014Nigeria is booming! The future looks bright and we at African Language Solutions predict the demand for language localization and translation into and out of Nigerian languages is going to boom too! As the caring, sharing type we thought we would invest some time in producing a report on the language landscape of Nigeria. With…
More Info
Linguicide in Cameroon
09/09/2014In Cameroon, the prevailing language in many fields, for example in court and in the media, is French. Not only does this mean the Anglophone inhabitants of the country are left out, this trend also seriously threatens Cameroon’s indigenous languages. Professor Peter Wuteh Vakunta, who works at the Department of Defence Language Institute in the…
More Info
The Afrikaans Language Debate
08/09/2014According to Marianne Thamm, the Afrikaans language isn’t used very often by its speakers. In fact, she believes activists only use Afrikaans to discuss the language itself! This way, the activists have disabled all public discourse on the issue, she says. On the Daily Maverick, Marianne Thamm has written an interesting piece on the African…
More Info
African Languages are Key to African Renaissance
08/09/2014Even though European languages are widely spoken on the African continent, some Africans believe that the African people should return to their mother languages. This so-called “African Renaissance” will not only keep Africa’s native languages from extinction, but will also prevent a lot of knowledge from disappearing. According to Apioth Mayom Apioth, ever since the…
More Info