Solutions Journalism: The African 'Babelfish'

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2024

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Africa is home to around one-third of the world's languages, but only a smattering of them are available online and in translation software. So when young Beninese computer scientist Bonaventure Dossou, who was fluent in French, experienced difficulties communicating with his mother, who spoke the local language Fon, he came up with an idea.

Bonaventure and a friend developed a French to Fon translation app, with speech recognition functionality, using an old missionary bible and volunteer questionnaires as the source data. Although rudimentary, they put the code online as open-source to be used by others. Bonaventure has since joined with other young African computer scientists and language activists called Masakane to use this code and share knowledge to increase digital accessibility for African and other lower-resourced languages. They want to be able to communicate across the African continent using translation software, with the ultimate goal being an "African Babel Fish", a simultaneous speech-to-speech translation for African languages.

James Jackson explores what role their ground-breaking software could play for societies in Africa disrupted by language barriers.

A Whistledown production for BBC World Service

Photo: A woman using a mobile phone Credit: Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm James Jackson and this is the documentary African Babelfish from the BBC World Service.
0:07.0	Try and saying something in Zulu from now.
0:12.0	In the science fiction series Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
0:16.0	a tiny alien fish called the Babyl Fish
0:19.0	fits in your ear and allows simultaneous translation
0:22.0	between all interplanetary languages.
0:26.1	In the modern world we have apps for that and I'm testing one with Moudir,
0:30.1	a fellow journalist in South Africa.
0:32.6	Say I'm sick doctor. a fellow journalist in South Africa.
0:35.2	Say I'm sick, doctor. Nikela a doctor, Nambu.
0:38.7	Okay, so I said I'm asking for the doctor, I'm sick, and it's translated just I'm asking for a doctor.
0:47.0	When the book came out in 1978, a babelfish was the product of Douglas Adams' imagination and scarcely believable.
0:57.0	But just imagine if you could instantly understand and talk to any other person, no matter what language they were speaking.
1:03.4	With between one of the students that are
1:06.4	a gang to a vie no me.
1:10.4	E vasey.
1:12.4	With between one and 2,000 languages Africa's home to around 1 3rd of the world's total languages,
1:19.0	but only a handful of these are accessible online or available in translation software.
1:25.0	As elements of education, finance, medicine and other crucial public services move online,
1:31.0	speakers of local African languages are at risk of being digitally left behind.
1:37.0	But now, a group of young African scientists, linguists and entrepreneurs called Masakane
1:45.6	want to solve this problem by harnessing modern computing technology and artificial intelligence,
	...

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