Scholar dreams of taking pansori to the world

Source: The Korea Herald

Korean literature professor leads English translation of all pansori lyrics

Pansori, a traditional form of narrative music performed by a solo singer, was added to UNESCO’s world heritage list nearly 10 years ago. But promoting pansori overseas has not been easy ― partly because there was no way for the foreign audience to understand the words during the performance.

To facilitate better appreciation of pansori performances, Choe Tong-hyon, Korean Language and Literature professor at Kunsan National University in North Jeolla Province, recently completed the translation of all texts of the five surviving pansori ― “Simcheongga,” “Heungbuga,” “Jeokbyeokga,” “Chunhyangga” and “Suggungga” ― a project that took five years.

“The amount of work was overwhelming. I thought I would die before I finished the work,” Choe told The Korea Herald in a telephone interview. The work was enormous for he was dedicated to translating all different “badi,” or versions, of each pansori. In all, he translated six different versions of each pansori on average which led him to publish a total of 21 books with 250-300 pages each.

The project was initially about publishing a book on pansori in English. But providing brief translation of summarized pansori stories does not mean anything, Choe said “The essence of the traditional narrative songs is bringing all sorts of emotions on the stage.” More.

See: The Korea Herald

NHS translation costs criticized (England)

Source: BBC

NHS translation bill tops £23m, says 2020 Health

The NHS in England spends £59,000 a day on translating documents and providing interpreters, according to a health think tank.

A Freedom of Information request by 2020 Health showed the total bill topped £23m last year – an increase of 17% since 2007, it said.

The organisation described the amount of money spent as “truly staggering”.

The government said the NHS had a duty to ensure patients and doctors could communicate with each other.

See: BBC

Finer points lost in Google translation

Source: The Montreal Gazette

Fifteen years ago, a chess-playing computer defeated the finest grandmaster in the world. Small wonder that some people see artificial intelligence as the next stage in human evolution. Yet despite the rapid and continual advances in technology, there are still certain tasks, relatively easy for humans, that computers find difficult. Facial recognition is one of them. Another is translation. For a sophisticated machine, thinking about a rook’s capture of a bishop four moves in advance is child’s play compared to figuring out idioms, metaphors, abbreviations, double meanings and slang.

A couple of weeks ago I happened to read a column on the TSN website about the Montreal Canadiens. It was a machine translation, made by Google, of a column by Mario Tremblay that had appeared on the website of RDS, the network’s sister site, in French. Tremblay’s prose is not particularly idiomatic, and most of his points were just about comprehensible – but it would be an exaggeration to say the TSN story was in English. Here are four examples of the published Google translation, followed by my human version.

“The Director General of the Canadian, Pierre Gauthier, seller is present: ” that’s how the column began. (The general manager of the Canadiens, Pierre Gauthier, is now ready to sell.) “Gauthier must linger to grow defensive.” (Gauthier needs to take his time to make the defence bigger.) “Many have before him.” (There are many teams ahead of them.) “His absence changed the data.” (His absence altered the situation.)

“Absence,” in French, is feminine, and the next sentence in Tremblay’s original column read as follows: “Elle a forcé Gauthier à aller chercher Kaberle et Chris Campoli.” Mysteriously, the machine twisted this into “She was forced to seek Gauthier Kaberle and Chris Campoli.” Google introduced other mistakes too. “Raphael Diaz et Subban, qui en est à sa deuxième saison” turned into the erroneous as well as ridiculous “Subban and Raphael Diaz, now in its second season.”

But even when the translated meaning is clear, the column’s wording often sounds peculiar to the ears of a native speaker: “the large center Ryan Getzlaf;” “none of them was sitting in the right chair because of injuries.” If it’s hard for a machine to translate a sentence with accuracy, it seems impossible for the machine to achieve elegance too. Even the most diehard technophile should not imagine that Google will eliminate the need for human interpreters and translators any time soon.

Salinas hospital to train indigenous-language interpreters

Source: HealthyCal

A new training program for medical interpreters is giving low-income women the skills needed for a hard-to-fill job – working as medical interpreters in indigenous languages.

Six medical interpreters will be taught to work with patients who speak indigenous languages from the Oaxacan region of Mexico, including the languages of Triqui, Mixteco and Zapotec, by the staff of the Natividad Medical Center in Salinas.

Linda Ford, the president and CEO of the Natividad Medical Foundation, said the group will try to recruit women who are trilingual in English, Spanish and an indigenous language.

“This has been a significant challenge here,” Ford said of the need for indigenous medical interpreters.

“The training trains interpreters to actually take cultural aspects into the medical care,” Ford said. “That is why it is so vital. We are not asking a family member, but someone who is trained with medical terminology.”

The Natividad Medical Foundation received a $25,000 grant through the Community Foundation for Monterey County’s Women’s Fund. The grant will cover stipends, transportation, books, and assistance with childcare for the participating women. The goal is that the women who complete training will be hired on a part-time or consultation basis to work with the hospital. More.

See: HealthyCal

‘Low readership behind limited translation of Urdu fiction’

Source: The Express Tribune

A literaty book with 200 copies can take years to sell but a magazine can easily sell copies many times more.

“This speaks about the complicated nature of the readership of Urdu fiction,” said noted literary figure Prof Muhammad Umar Memon at a critical literary session on “Urdu Fiction and its Audience” held here on Friday.

Dr Memon pointed out that the knowledge about scarce readership of Urdu literature can be answered by analysing the number of literate people who are interested in fiction.

Sharing his experience on translations, Dr Memon said he often amalgamates or divides sentences to make more sense of the work in the other language.

In addition to that, he also addressed the large canon of translations in Persian and Arabic compared to Urdu. He regretted that Urdu literature lacks the translation it deserves even though it is far more comprehensive and vast.

He also spoke on problems in translations due to cultural disparity and highlighted the difference which must be accounted for while translating a literary work. Some works, he posited, are simply untranslatable due to their firm grounding within a language and/or culture.

The notion of transcreating instead of translating was also introduced, which can entail transforming a work instead of trying to mimic the original. However, transcreating is a fairly new concept that is only accomplished by professionals. More.

See: The Express Tribune

De La Salle College wins EU Young Translators’ Contest, again

Source: The Malta Independent online

The Maltese winner of the European Commission’s annual Young Translators’ Contest, known as ‘Juvenes Translatores’ was announced this week. She is Natalia Grima – a Sixth Former at De La Salle College – who had the best translation out of six schools, the maximum number of Maltese schools that can participate in the contest.

A winner for each EU country was selected from among more than 3,000 students who participated in the contest last November. The winners, including Natalia, will be invited to Brussels on 27 March to receive their prizes and to meet translators at work in the Commission.

“This contest encourages students to get to grips with foreign languages in a deeper way and to consider using their knowledge in their future career, whether as a translator or in any other professional field where multilingualism is an asset,” said Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth. “The contest also inspires schools to learn from each other and try out different methods of language teaching.”

The winners all demonstrate that a knowledge of languages can take you further and open your mind to new possibilities. More.

See: The Malta Independent

Winners announced in EU Young Translators’ Contest

Source: FOCUS News Agency

Brussels. The names of the 27 winners of the European Commission’s annual Young Translators’ Contest, known as ‘Juvenes Translatores’, are published today. A winner for each EU country was selected from among more than 3 000 secondary school pupils in total who sat the contest in November 2011. The winner in Bulgaria is Denitsa Marchevska from the city of Ruse. She translated from German into Bulgarian, the EC press service announced.

The number of entrants was up by more than 400 compared to last year and was the highest since the launch of the contest in 2007. The winners will be invited to Brussels on 27 March to receive their prizes and to meet translators at work in the Commission.

“This contest encourages pupils to get to grips with foreign languages in a deeper way and to consider using their knowledge in their future career, whether as a translator or in any other professional field where multilingualism is an asset,” said Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth. “The contest also inspires schools to learn from each other and try out different methods of language teaching.”
The winners all demonstrate that a knowledge of languages can take you further and open your mind to new possibilities.
The German winner, for instance, wanted to go to a music school in Hungary, so as well as perfecting her skills on the flute and piano, she also learnt to speak Hungarian. The Romanian winner wrote a biophysics paper which was partly based on technical English source material which she translated herself. With her knowledge of French, German, Dutch, English and Spanish, the Luxembourg winner truly embodies her country’s multilingual tradition.
The contestants all translated a one-page text based on their choice of any of the 506 language combinations possible among the EU’s 23 official languages. Although many chose English as a source language, the total number of language combinations used was 148, which was the highest since the launch of the competition.
The theme of this year’s texts was volunteering (to mark the European Year of Volunteering 2011), but each language test featured different facets of the subject: the Dutch text, for instance, focused on restoring a church in Tuscany; the French translation paper focused on beach cleaning, the Polish one on working in a Chilean school for under-privileged children. A number of the teenagers who sat the contest in different countries were clearly inspired by the volunteering theme, with some deciding to enrol as volunteers for the Red Cross and other NGOs afterwards.

Arabic translation of English books launched

Source: Gulf Times

The Department of Studies and Cultural Research in the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage released three books in Arabic translated from English yesterday. They are India Wins Freedom by Moulana Abul Kalam Azad and translated into Arabic by Dr (Ms) Nabila Yusuf al-Zawawy; Arabic Words in Hindi, Urdu and Tamil by Dr SMM Nainar,  and translated into Arabic by Qadi Abdul Rasheed al-Nadwi under the title The Impact of Arabic on Indian Languages; and Virtual Freedom by Dawn Nunziato translated into Arabic by Anwar el-Shamy.

Addressing a press conference on the occasion, the Department’s Director Dr Marzook Basher Binmarzook explained that publishing translations of thought-provoking works from different parts of the world is an ongoing programme in his department. “Our aim is to enrich our literature and open new vistas of thought and reflection in the Arab world,” he said. More.

See: Gulf Times

Bright sparks amid gloom over the number of foreign-language books reaching English readers (UK)

Source: The Guardian

That nasty rumour still won’t go away: publishing houses in the UK are allergic to literary fiction in translation. A recent report by English PENeven warned that “future geniuses comparable to Murakami or García Márquez might never become accessible to English readers” if the situation isn’t properly addressed. Are we really on the verge of a drought?

On Monday night, a conversation had around a stove-heater in a greenhouse in Wapping gave reason for a bit more hope. It was the latest reading group of young publisher And Other Stories, which has jettisoned one traditional tool of the translated-fiction world: the book report. Usually written by readers outside the company, these short assessments are often all a commissioning editor has to go on when deciding whether or not to buy the rights to a foreign book. So although insufficient, they have up to now been indispensable, too.

But what if you gather together readers, translators and editors, all grounded in the literature of a region, to talk for a whole evening about the books you’re considering? One of the reasons this doesn’t sound plausible is that no money is offered to readers. (Book reports are done for a fee which, although it won’t get you much more than your groceries and bus fares for a week, at least recognises that there is some expertise involved.) It is And Other Stories’s modus operandi, though, and it seems to be working.

Monday’s meeting, at the Wapping Project Bookshop, was of the Spanish-language group. The debate – about a recent crop of Latin American novels – surely beats a small attachment quietly dropping into the inbox. Does Colombian Antonio Ungar stretch credibility too far? (Half an hour.) Can any Latin American novelist – Cuban Abilio Estévez, in this case – use a house as a metaphor for family history and not make us feel like we’ve heard it all before? (See One Hundred Years of Solitude.) For warmth, we’d transferred to the pub by the time we got on to the third book. Can the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa crowd her narrative with dead writers revived for a literary conference and get away with it? More.

See: The Guardian

2012 Susan Sontag Prize for Literary Translation from Portuguese into English

Source: Susan Sontag

PLEASE NOTE: The deadline is March 9, 2012.

________________________________________________________

This $5,000 grant will be awarded to a proposed work of literary translation from Portuguese into English and is open to anyone under the age of 30. The translation must fall under the category of fiction or letters, and the applicant will propose his or her own translation project. The project should be manageable for a five-month period of work, as the grant will be awarded in June 2012, and the translation must be completed by October 2012.

Acceptable proposals include a novella, a play, a collection of short stories or poems, or a collection of letters that have literary import. Preference will be given to works that have not been previously translated. (Previously translated works will be considered, however applicants should include an explanation for why they are proposing a new translation.) Applicants wishing to translate significantly longer works should contact the Foundation before sending in their applications so that supplementary materials can be included. The prizewinner will be notified on June 1, 2012 and results will be announced online at www.susansontag.org.

The recipient will be expected to participate in symposia on literary translation with established writers and translators, as well as public readings of their work once the translation has been completed.

Application Requirements (Please download the application here.) All applications must include three copies of the following:

• Application Cover Sheet (available here)

• Personal Statement (2 pages maximum) explaining your interest and background in literature and the source language

• Project proposal (2 pages maximum) outlining the work and describing its importance

• 5 page sample translation of the proposed work from the source language into English

• The same passage in the original language

• A bio-bibliography of the author (including information on previous translations of his or her work into English)

• One academic letter of recommendation

• Official transcript from your current or most recent academic institution

All applications must be submitted via regular mail to the address:

Susan Sontag Foundation

76 Franklin St. #3

New York, NY 10013

See: Susan Sontag

Polish Ambassador responds to Irish Independent’s ‘Magda’ dole article: Full text

Source: The Journal

THE POLISH AMBASSADOR to Ireland has responded strongly to an article in an Irish newspaper which purported to give an account of a Polish woman’s life on the dole in Donegal.

Marcin Nawrot criticised the piece in today’s Irish Independent for its inaccuracy and said that it was ‘subjective and selective’ in how it presented the story.

The article purported to be about an account given by ‘Magda’ to a Polish newspaper about the benefits she enjoyed from the social welfare system. However in a letter to the News Editor of the paper, Ambassador Nawrot said there were a number of inaccuracies in the Irish Independent piece which could have been avoided through a proper translation or a more objective approach.

“In terms of her describing her life as “Hawaiian Massage”, at no stage in this article does she make such a statement,” writes the Ambassador.

“What she actually says is that she has completed a FÁS course in Hawaiian Massage and that she’s planning to open a massage business next year. I think you can agree that this misrepresentation completely changes the tone of the article”.

He says that there were “many other inaccuracies… throughout the Irish Independent article which could have been easily avoided if only the Polish article had been translated correctly or its content presented in a more objective manner”. More.

See: The Journal

Also see: Irish Times

Demand for French classes on the rise in EU circles

Source: Euractiv

Wrexham chosen as bilingual town to promote Welsh language

Source: BBC News

Wrexham has become the first location in Wales chosen to be a “bilingual town” in a scheme to promote the use of the Welsh language

The project, drawn up by the Welsh government and Welsh Language Board, hopes to encourage more people to use Welsh in everyday life in the town.

Scheme supporters say they want to build on the enthusiasm brought by last year’s National Eisteddfod to Wrexham.

Project consultant Cefin Campbell said it was a fantastic chance for the town.

‘Generate momentum’

“People want to see more Welsh-medium education in Wrexham, more opportunities for Welsh learners to use the language,” he insisted.

“It’s a chance to create a focus for the Welsh language and hopefully it will draw young people in as well to use the language – and that has to be one of the main challenges.”

The project also follows the opening earlier in January of a new Welsh language centre, Saith Seren, at the former Seven Stars pub in the town centre. More.

See: BBC News

Paulo Coelho calls on readers to pirate books

Source: The Guardian

Bestselling Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho is joining in with a new promotion on the notorious file-sharing site the Pirate Bay, and calling on “pirates of the world” to “unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written”.

Coelho has long been a supporter of illegal downloads of his writing, ever since a pirated Russian edition of The Alchemist was posted online in 1999 and, far from damaging sales in the country, sent them soaring to a million copies by 2002 and more than 12m today. His latest move goes a step further, however, joining in with a new programme on The Pirate Bay and exhorting readers to download all his work for free.

Signing off as “The Pirate Coelho”, the author told readers on his blog about “a new and interesting system to promote the arts” on The Pirate Bay. “Do you have a band? Are you an aspiring movie producer? A comedian? A cartoon artist? They will replace the front page logo with a link to your work,” wrote Coelho. “As soon as I learned about it, I decided to participate. Several of my books are there, and … the physical sales of my books are growing since my readers post them in P2P sites.”

From his debut The Alchemist, a fable of a young Andalucian shepherd boy, to his most recent book Aleph, which describes “a remarkable and transformative journey of self- discovery”, Coelho’s spiritual writing has sold 300m copies around the world. The author has said in the past that “you can add another 20% for pirated editions”.

(…)

“The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever. First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey. Second, because all writers want what they write to be read, whether in a newspaper, blog, pamphlet, or on a wall,” he said. “The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD. It’s the same with literature. The more people ‘pirate’ a book, the better. If they like the beginning, they’ll buy the whole book the next day, because there’s nothing more tiring than reading long screeds of text on a computer screen.” More.

See: The Guardian

Whoopensocker dictionary of American dialect completed after 50 years

Source: The Guardian

Collecting regional English from across the US, final volume of 60,000-entry dictionary will be published next month

From whoopensocker to upscuddle, strubbly to swivet, 50 years after it was first conceived the Dictionary of American Regional English is finally about to reach the end of the alphabet.

The fifth volume of the dictionary, covering “slab” to “zydeco”, is out in March from Harvard University Press. It completes a project begun in 1962 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, when Fred Cassidy was appointed chief editor of a dictionary of American dialects. Cassidy spent several years crafting a 1,600-question survey covering all aspects of daily life, and in 1965, 80 fieldworkers set out in “word wagons” to 1,002 communities across the US, interviewing 2,777 people over six years. This information has been mapped by editors over the last 40 years with written materials dating from the colonial period to the present, creating a 60,000-entry dictionary that its chief editor says gives the lie to the popular myth that American English has become homogenised by the media and the mobility of America’s population.

Some of Hall’s favourite terms from the fifth volume, which runs to over 1,200 pages, include whoopensocker (something extraordinary of its kind, especially a large or strong drink, chiefly used in Wisconsin), willywags (a New England term for an area with tangled underbrush), upscuddle (southern Appalachian term for a noisy quarrel), strubbly (Pennsylvania German term for untidy) and swivet (a term for a state of anxiety from the South). A slough pumper is the Minnesota term for a bittern, because it lives in sloughs or marshes and makes a noise like an old wooden pump, a tolo is the Washington State word for a dance to which women invite men, and to “tump over” is to knock something over in the South.

The dictionary shows how different regions of the US refer to the same item in various ways: fluff under the bed is described as dust kitties in the Northeast, dust bunnies in the Midwest, house moss in the South and woolies in Pennsylvania, while a sandwich will be a po’boy in Louisiana, but a hoagie, sub, grinder, hero, or torpedo elsewhere. A description of a remote place, meanwhile, can range from the boondocks to the puckerbrush, the tules, or to Hall’s favourite, the willywags. More.

See: The Guardian

News from the Translation Center

Source: Translators without Borders

During the last week 7 humanitarian organizations asked for the translation of 41 files in 8 different language pairs with a total of 82,000 words, and all these requests were accepted by the voluntary translators without borders.

The lack of information in local languages kills people! A public call was made to the community, asking for volunteer translators from English into Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Konkani, Oriya, Malayalam, Marathi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit and Telugu. Please help us spread the word.

The Spanish humanitarian organization Acción contra el Hambre posted their first translation requests in the Translation Center. Translators without Borders would like to work for other humanitarian organisations in languages such as Spanish, Romanian, Turkish and Russian.

The current issue of Translorial, the journal of the Northern California Translators Association, includes an article on Translators without Borders and our Translation Center entitled TRANSLATING FOR HUMANITY and written by Françoise Herrmann

Translation specialist set on preserving Cherokee language

Source: Cherokee Phoenix

Cherokee speaker and translator John Ross is focused and determined to do his part in preserving the Cherokee language. 

Ross, 56, originally of the Greasy Community in Adair County, is one of six translation specialists in the Cherokee Nation’s translation department where documents,

signs, books and other printed items are translated from English into Cherokee. 

Ross said his main task is translating three books a month for Cherokee Immersion School students.

“That’s our priority. Then we work with all the departments in the Cherokee Nation. We translate words and phrases, and we do about 30 translations a month.” 

The department also translates three to four articles from English into Cherokee for the Cherokee Phoenix each month, and coordinates the Cherokee language

proficiency test for employees wanting to be recognized for their language knowledge. He said about 100 employees have taken the proficiency test. More.

See: Cherokee Phoenix

Shakespeare’s skill was in his grammar not his language, academic claims

Source: The Telegraph

For centuries Shakespeare has been celebrated not just for his genius as a playwright, but for creating many of today’s most commonly used words and phrases.

But now academics have challenged the long held view of Shakespeare as the father of modern language, claiming he was no more inventive with words than any of his contemporaries.

Instead a new study has suggested his real genius lay in the unique way he used grammar to construct sentences, adding a poetic element to English and setting him apart from all other writers of the time.

In a new study Dr Jonathan Hope, from Strathclyde University, compared Shakespeare’s work with playwrights including Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson and the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe.

His findings revealed that while they were not nearly as prolific as The Bard, proportionately they were responsible for inventing just as many new words.

Shakespeare’s innovative use of grammar, however, set him apart from his contemporaries. According to Dr Hope, Shakespeare completely reinvented grammar, breaking away from the conformity of traditional rules.

Dr Hope highlighted a passage from Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 4, where Shakespeare plays with the normal rules of English that demand a sentence is structured with the order; subject, verb, object.

In the scene the queen says to her son: “Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.” Dr Hope explained: “In present day English we would expect, ‘Thou has much offended thy father Hamlet’.”

He also praised the way in which Shakespeare used adjectives to describe inanimate objects, a technique that was considered radical in 16th century writing. More.

See: The Telegraph

Centralizing language services saves money, improves productivity, and means faster time to market

Source: Common Sense Advisory

International businesses need translation in many different parts of their companies. They require language support for their global websites, marketing and sales collateral, support content, help forums, technical manuals, compliance documents, and human resources materials. As a result, several different departments end up buying language services from diverse suppliers all over the world. But does this make the most sense, at a time when budgets are restricted, and companies need to do all they can to save money?

New data from independent market research firm Common Sense Advisory confirms that the opposite is true: centralization of language services can lead to lower costs and faster times to market for higher volumes of translated content. The firm surveyed 226 respondents at global businesses that purchase language-related services. Most of these organizations reported that their spending on translation had increased from 2010 to 2011, in spite of global economic woes.

“Survey respondents predicted that 25% of their projects will be one million words or more by 2012,” points out Rebecca Ray, senior analyst at Common Sense Advisory, and lead author of the study. “Projects of this size typically include 15 or more languages. Since so many translation tasks are outsourced, international businesses find themselves faced with huge scalability challenges and an almost complete dependency on their translation providers.”

Key findings detailed in “Translation Performance Metrics” include:

• The cost of translation is minuscule compared to the revenue it can generate. Almost all firms reported that their cost of translation was far below 1% of total revenue.

• Key vertical industries are increasing spend on language services. Manufacturing, financial services and insurance, and health care all grew by more than 25%. Software and related services expanded by 18%.

• Size matters for language service budgets. Most organizations expected their spending levels to increase from 2010 to 2011. Companies with the highest revenue – US$10 billion or more – predicted the highest percentage increase (31.13%).

• Buyers of language services are counting on vendors to resolve scalability challenges. As clients continue to spend the majority of their translation budgets on outsourced services, they expect providers to help stretch their budgets to cover more languages and more content. They are also seeking support from vendor partners for centralization initiatives, project management, linguistic quality programs, localization engineering, machine translation (MT) integration, training, and community building.

• Project size and number of languages are trending up. Big projects (one million words or more) grew across almost all industries, regardless of content type. Survey respondents predicted that 25% of their projects would be one million words or more by 2012. Projects of 10,000 words or less in 2009 averaged 16 languages; in 2012, they were predicted to reach 20.
• Average turnaround time is one week or less. Sixty percent of respondents stated that their average turnaround time was up to a week, with the largest group claiming two days or less. More.

See: Common Sense Advisory

State entities must use three languages (Africa)

Source: Business Day

Arts and Culture Minister Paul Mashatile has called for the government to use African languages.

THE government’s constitutional obligation to ensure the equal status of official languages should see at least three languages used by government services, including public enterprises such as Eskom, Arts and Culture Minister Paul Mashatilesaid on Friday.

Mr Mashatile said the use of African languages by the government was not just necessary because of constitutional obligations, but would also ensure high levels of public service to speakers of African languages.

The draft South African Languages Bill is before Parliament and aims to provide for regulation and monitoring of official language usage by the government.

National and provincial government are required to use at least two official languages.

English and Afrikaans, however, are predominant, and critics say indigenous African languages are being sidelined.

SA does not have legislation regulating language use by the government, with the Cabinet having rejected a Language Bill in 2007. The Pan South African Language Board (Pansalb), the chapter 9 institution set up to promote indigenous languages, has been criticised as dysfunctional. More.

See: Business Day