VOA Hausa Digital Content Editor

The Voice of America (VOA) is hiring a Digital Content Editor for its Hausa service. Normally I do not post jobs on Beyond Niamey, but rather do so occasionally on the Facebook African languages group. In this case I am making an exception since it seems that the person hired by VOA will be in a position to possibly help the organization finally move its Hausa web content from an ASCIIfied version to the Boko orthography - a topic that has been discussed previously on this blog.

Links to the position announcement are below, but first a quick review of the issue. The Latin-based "Boko" alphabet for Hausa includes several modified letters (technically called "extended characters") that stand for sounds not represented in the alphabet as used in English, French or other European languages. Sometimes called "hooked letters" they include: ɓ ; ɗ ; ƙ ; and in Niger, ƴ - in Nigeria 'y is written for the same sound as the last one. The capital letter forms of the four hooked letters are Ɓ Ɗ Ƙ Ƴ.

When VOA and other international radio services - notably BBC, CRI, and RDW - began websites for their respective Hausa services, the Unicode standard that facilitates display of extended Latin characters and diverse writing systems on the internet, was not in widespread use (RFI added its Hausa service later). Evidently this was the reason for resort to an ASCIIfied rendering of Hausa text (with b, d, k, and y instead of the hooked characters, which can change meanings) - older systems then in use among the audience may not have been able to handle the Unicode-encoded hooked letters.

That argument is losing credence, if it is not already meaningless. The number of systems in use old enough not to have Unicode fonts (now the norm but the earliest of them were already in systems over a decade ago) must be very few. Moreover all the 5 international radio Hausa sites use UTF-8, which displays Unicode.

So what is the current state of use of the Boko orthography (with the hooked letters) on the five sites - VOA, BBC, CRI, RDW, and RFI? I used a new way of evaluating them - actually bringing back an old trick - which is to search just the letters on the sites with Google. The best way is to use Google advanced search, or just put a sequence like this in the search window of the usual Google page:

ƙ OR ɓ OR ɗ OR ƴ site:voahausa.com

This pulls up all pages on the site with at least one of these hooked letters. You can substitute the domain of the site you want to evaluate. My results were: BBC 16 pages; RDW 7 pages; VOA, CRI, and RFI all 0. Not impressive.

What's holding them back? Inertia? Lack of a keyboard layout to easily type with the hooked letters? Lack of a spell checker for Hausa in Boko orthography?

In any event, the new Digital Content Editor for the VOA Hausa service would be in a position to make a significant contribution to that service's web content, with secondary effects on other Hausa language websites.

The position has two listings on the USAjobs.gov site: one for US citizens; and one for non-US citizens. (This sort of dual listing is normal; you see it also sometimes for internal candidates in an agency and for external candidates applying from outside the agency.) The position was announced today, 9/6/16, and closes 9/20/16.