Health info in African languages, on 2 non-African sites

Here are quick reviews of two websites - one Australian the other American - that have health information in numerous world languages, including a number from Africa. Both are primarily intended to serve immigrant communities. This post will then return briefly to the theme of the benefits of systematically sharing and improving of health related information composed in or translated into African languages.

Health Translations

Health Translations is a website maintained by the government of the state of Victoria in Australia.  It has information (mainly documents such as fact sheets and flyers, from what I can tell, some with illustrations) on over 80 topics in a total of almost 100 languages or language varieties (although not all information is in every language, and some languages have few items).

The African languages for which there are materials include: Afrikaans; Akan; Amharic; Arabic; Bemba; Dinka; Juba Arabic; Kirundi; Krio; Lingala; Nuer; Oromo; Shona; Somali; Sudanese Arabic (also listed as Sudanese); Swahili (Congolese); Swahili (Kenyan); and Tigrinya.

This is an impressive collection of materials from various sources, apparently all Australian, and in different formats. They appear to all be translations - a given material may be available in a few or quite a number of language versions. Navigating from the a click on the desired language on the list of languages (which helpfully includes both English & native names/scripts) to a particular topical resource requires interacting with screens in English - not surprising, but when one gets to the list of topics and resources in a particular language, the titles are only in English, and then on the list of languages in which a material is translated (this is a typical navigation sequence), the language names are in English (no native scripts used). So the resource appears intended to be used by or with help of professionals or others who can read English.

Source: Bushfire smoke & your health [am]

I'm not able to evaluate the quality of the translations, but noted French in Lingala (which may simply be typically used loanwords) and by chance an anomalous English word in an Amharic text (image).

All the several documents I viewed were PDFs, mainly text but some image (meaning the text cannot be searched or copied out for editing into other materials). Spot checking some non-Latin text, specifically Ethiopic/Ge'ez used for Amharic and Tigrinya, and complex Latin, specifically for Dinka, there were some issues with the text that would interfere with searches or copying out passages (such problems are not uncommon with PDF rendering, even when visually the PDF presents everything correctly and in its intended place).

Some Amharic text when copied out and pasted showed capital A for አ and E for እ in initial position (for example, here). The corresponding characters are appropriate, interestingly, but this makes search or reuse of such text problematic.

From original (l.); copy-pasted out (r.)
Source: Bushfire smoke ... [din]

The Dinka text sampled showed some typical problems with complex Latin in PDFs. Dinka is written with what I call in ALDA a "category 4" Latin orthography in that it includes extended Latin characters (aka modified letters) plus combining diacritics, sometimes together as in the open-o with diaeresis in the word "daiɣɔ̈kthai" (dioxide) featured on the left side of the image. Copying that word from the PDF and pasting it in a word processor or advanced text editor yielded the results on the right, missing one extended character and the combining diacritic on the other. This complicates any potential re-use of this text, but also means that document, folder, or web searches will not pick up words with such character combinations.

Will return to these issues, why they're important, and what to do about them in the last section of this post.

 

HealthReach

HealthReach: Health Information in Many Languages is a program of the US Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health. It includes translations in 46 languages maintained on the MedinePlus site. A total of almost 350 topics are listed (although here too, not all information is in every language, and some languages have fewer items than others).

The African languages for which there are materials include: Amharic; Arabic; Oromo; Somali; Swahili; and Tigrinya, The native names of languages are featured on the list of languages, except oddly for Amharic and Tigrinya, which are transliterated into Latin ("amarunya" instead of አማርኛ, and "tigrinya" instead of ትግርኛ).

This also is an impressive collection from diverse sources, in this case American, but it is longer on topics and shorter on languages covered. The list of topics for each language also includes the titles in the language and its script - except again for Amharic and Tigrinya (not even transliterations) - as well as in English.

All materials checked were PDFs. There are no materials for African languages with complex Latin scripts.

As for non-Latin scripts, text in Arabic seems to behave as intended, from small samples. On the other hand, some Amharic text when copied out and pasted showed the same capital A for አ and E for እ observed above, plus O for ኦ (see here).  A Tigrinya document had a similar issue. So this issue may have to do with a problem in PDFs for handling a particular set of characters - አኡኢኣኤእኦኧ (representing glottal stop plus the range of vowels) - or a subset of them, which might be helpful to know when troubleshooting.

Health education materials and the "2Ds & 4Rs"

In highlighting aspects of public health messaging during the ebola epidemic in West Africa (2014-15), this blog suggested a systematic approach to sharing and improving materials that were developed and used in that context (with primary attention to text and images). A mnemonic - 2Ds & 4Rs - was put forth in October 2014, initially to explain the rationale for reposting and discussing various ebola education materials, but also as a way to capture the ideal cycle of utility of such production. Too often, materials are developed, used for a particular purpose, and then forgotten, when they could add to a growing living corpus of resources to tap for future work. This is important in any field and language, but arguably especially important in health, and for languages that have fewer resources and emerging terminologies / technical lexicons, such as many in Africa.

In that context I propose to use the 2Ds & 4Rs to consider the efforts represented by the two sites discussed above. Of the 6 elements of this model, the first three have to do more with the sharing and use of materials, and the last three with their longer term development and potential re-use. These are listed with brief explanations and what I see as relevance to the two sites:

• Dissemination (making materials available, including via multiple sources)
• Both sites bring together and post materials from diverse sources, increasing their exposure and access to them.
• Demonstration (showing how materials in African languages can be presented, including in cases where complex scripts are involved)
• Both sites show that African language materials can be presented on the same footing as other world languages.
• However, the HealthReach presentation does not use available technology to present the native names of Amharic and Tigrinya, or titles of materials in those languages.
• Reading (creating or translating text materials with attention to how they may be read aloud in groups or over local radio, which may be more likely scenarios for their use than the typical Western expectation of silent reading by individuals)
•  It appears that all or most of the materials from diverse sources compiled on the two sites are translations from English of technical descriptions and advice. It is not clear how well how well adapted they are for the range of uses and audiences they might serve.
• Review (written material - text - is well suited for review, comparison, and analysis; such material, especially in less resourced languages and on issues of public importance like health, should undergo such treatment)
• No information on how any of the materials may be or have been reviewed, either in the diverse organizations where they originated, or in the projects hosting the two websites. 
• Image PDFs, where these occur, do not lend themselves to processes of review.
• Text PDFs with problems in their encoding of non-Latin or complex Latin scripts, present problems for review.
• Revision (after review of materials, and in response to other information and feedback relevant to them, materials should undergo appropriate revisions in content, form of language, copyediting, and presentation)
• No information on any revisions of any of the materials.
• Issues cited under "Review" with image PDFs and with text PDFs that have encoding problems also hinder revision work.
• Re-use or re-purposing (text materials can be re-used or sections re-purposed)
• No information on re-use or re-purposing of any of the materials.

The two sites profiled above and the various health and medical education materials presented on them represent an important resource for fifteen African languages (and some varieties of two of those).

One additional question is whether such materials, intended primarily to serve needs of immigrants in Australia and the US, might be useful as is or with modifications, for speakers of the same languages in relevant African countries. Or in the reverse sense, whether any health extension materials from Africa might inform revision of these materials and development of new ones. A next step could be a for a site to begin to collect health materials in African languages from all sources.

There are many directions in which this could be taken, with the goals of improving availability, quality and utility of health education information in a range of African languages. One, for example, is linking with the longstanding WikiProject Med's Translation Task Force for development of articles in those African languages that have Wikipedias (such as Afrikaans, Akan, Amharic, Arabic, Kirundi, Lingala, Oromo, Shona, Somali, Swahili, and Tigrinya). Another might be connecting with efforts to advance development of standard terminologies. Still another might be to bring in human language technology, such as text to speech, so that materials designed and disseminated in text form could be accessible in audio via mobile devices.

Thanks to Charles Riley of Yale University for calling our attention to these two websites.

Multilingual extension in Africa: Framing the contexts

This post continues the discussion about multilingual extension and public education responses to emergencies where there are many languages from the previous post about the response to the West African ebola epidemic, with a look at general lessons and strategies.

Multilingual marketing & multilingual extension

There is a lot of information available about multilingual marketing aimed mainly at commercial users, and often with a focus on web content, for example on blogs and news sites (Business 2 Community, Business News Daily, ClickZ, Mention, Search Engine Journal), and corporate sites (ADAM, Ecoconsultancy, Lionbridge, MarketingProfs). Part of the pitch in these pieces is that most people base decisions like purchasing on information in their principal language, and most people do not speak English. Hence the need to localize messages, involving primarily translation but also attention to cultural norms and sensibilities. Multilingual marketing strategies allow a message to reach a linguistically diverse population - no mystery there. Most of the focus of such discussion, however, is on parts of the world with lucrative markets and good connectivity - much of the global North plus dynamic urban centers globally.

Although one can certainly tap such advice for information relevant to a range of situations, there is not any comparable font of advice that I'm aware of focused on strategies for extension, development communication, public health education, or messaging relating to crises in the multilingual global South, including Africa. These regions tend to have less disposable income and less connectivity than in the global North. And large numbers of their populations, if not majorities, speak languages that may be at once "less-resourced" in technical and literary senses, absent from school curricula or taught only in the first couple of grades, and given lower in status than that accorded the main European, Asian, and Middle Eastern languages.

The relative lack of prioritization of African language messaging by international entities involved in the ebola response can be seen in this context.

Understanding African linguistic realities

Planning for use of diverse languages in extension and public education, or even just accepting that it is worthwhile, requires understanding the "linguistic terrain," which may be defined as including information about the languages spoken (what they are and how they are related), the linguistic demography (who speaks what in what areas), and relevant sociolinguistic factors (how various languages are used, status of languages, etc.). Understanding the linguistic terrain, in turn, requires attention to specifics, and may be facilitated by models or "frameworks" which put such specifics into perspectives useful for action.

For instance, figures on the number of languages spoken in a country are readily accessed, and not infrequently these elicit in foreigners the impression of a kind of Babel, too complicated to deal with beyond maybe assuring there is local staff able to interpret as needed (else just relying on ad hoc interpretation in the field). Beyond the numbers, the names may be unfamiliar, issues of who speaks what where and when not understood, the close relationship of some sets of languages with different names unknown, and there's always someone ready to offer a rationale for not bothering with African languages.

In approaching the multiplicity of languages in multilingual African countries, the first task is getting past the numbers, to put some identity to the names, and then to frame some understanding of how they are (and could be) used, by whom, where, and when.

Hierarchies, relationships, and priorities

The simplest and easiest framework in which to approach linguistic diversity in Africa - which arguably the default understanding for many - is a hierarchy in which the "Europhone" international languages are higher, and "local languages" are lower. That could be on the basis of several factors - elite status, career and education opportunities, existence of written and digital resources, number of speakers globally - but not others - mother tongue status, cultural content, number of speakers locally/regionally.

Classes of development of a linguistic variety proposed by Kloss (1978),
as quoted in Mioni (1988). Source: Guerini (2006:33)

The diagram at the right, adapted from work by Heinz Kloss, illustrates what such a hierarchy might look like (though I'm interpreting it here for purposes different than it was proposed). In many African countries, a Europhone official languages is #1 in such a ranking (Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Swahili might also be considered here), and most other languages are down the scale (per the diagram, they all would be nos. 4-6).

Such a simple hierarchy may have utility for description, but also has limitations - perhaps notably in confirming biases. It is probably not a good guide for communication strategies.

Hierarchy of  languages in de Swaan's (2001) theory. Source:
Wikimedia Commons, By Jqho1 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

A hierarchical approach proposing a system of relations was Abram de Swaan's global language system theory (developed across several publications culminating in a 2001 book). He considered languages as forming a network of "constellations," each having more central and more peripheral languages. De Swaan's system adopts the core-periphery paradigm of world system theory, and includes arguments from history and a mathematical model for the communicative value of a language (Q-value). A more complete discussion of his work is beyond the scope of this post, but for our purposes, the model has been widely influential.

Source: Calvet (2006:76)

Among those referencing De Swaan, Louis-Jean Calvet (1999, 2006) explored how this approach works and may change in several regions. In one African case - Mali - it is clear that some languages do not fit simply into a hierarchical system of constellations (in a different discussion, we'd be calling many of these "cross-border languages," although the limits of constellations do not follow country boundaries).

In general the constellation approach seems most useful when analyzing the global or broad regional systems, and may not be helpful in communication strategies that require dissemination of messages in what are framed as peripheral languages.

Rough long-tail distro of 1st+2nd languages in Mali

A different approach that I have discussed previously (in general and in the case of Mali) uses the observation that numbers of speakers of languages as a rule follow a long-tail distribution. This is true at any scale, but the languages at the head of the distribution at more local levels may be different than those at a regional or country levels. This is not necessarily better than the constellation approach, but it does offer a different understanding of data that suggests different priorities. Arguably when a crisis such as ebola is most critical in certain localities, awareness of the language distributions on those local levels might be important for effective messaging there.

Types of African language repertoires in Mioni (1988).
Source: Guerini (2006:30-32) (combined 3 figures)

Since linguistic demographics and language policies differ by country it is also important to look at the organization of languages at that level. Alberto Mioni (1988) proposed three language profiles common in African countries: 1) a typical one with a "high language" (HL), usually an "exolanguage," what I have been calling Europhone languages, a national lingua franca, and local languages; 2) having two HLs, a developed national standard and an exolanguage, along with local languages; and 3) with local standard unavailable/undeveloped, and just the HL and local languages. These are simplifications, and like the hierarchical models above, they broadly minimize smaller languages that may be important locally, but they may provide a context for application of another analysis like the long-tail.

The reason for reviewing the above is that taken together, they might be used as alternative "framing" of a given sociolinguistic situation to arrive at a better understanding for planning purposes. That is, while studying the specifics of what languages are spoken in a country is essential (especially for foreigners working there), having diverse conceptual tools to understand the communication environment may be key to appropriate and successful messaging.

Leveraging the global networks of local languages

Due to emigration, there are communities of speakers of many African languages in diverse parts of the world. In other contexts (such as African language Wikipedias) it has been pointed out that these communities may be resources for development of materials.

In the case of epidemics that take on global dimensions, it may be possible to link multilingual messaging approaches between countries where a language is spoken natively, and communities of speakers in other countries (emigrants, diaspora). When fear of a wider ebola epidemic was at its height, the issue of translation was brought up in the US, for example, but apparently without making this link.

Taking multilingual extension to another level

The above is hardly comprehensive, but seeks to outline conceptual approaches to use in strategies for messaging in multilingual Africa, in emergencies like the ebola epidemic, but also general development communication. The previous post on lessons from the response to ebola, reviewed some specific issues. Taken together they are intended to promote discussion leading to more effective and appropriate use of African languages in a range of public education and development contexts.

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References:

• Louis-Jean Calvet, 2006, Towards and Ecology of World Languages, Polity Press. (Translated by Andrew Brown from 1999, Pour une écologie des langues du monde, Plon)
• Federica Guerini, 2006, Language Alternation Strategies in Multilingual Settings: A Case Study: Ghanaian Immigrants in Northern Italy, Peter Lang.
• Heinz Kloss, 1978, Problems of Language Policy in South Africa, Braumüller.
• Alberto Mioni, 1988, "Standardization Processes and Linguistic Repertoires in Africa and Europe: Some Comparative Remarks," in Peter Auer and Aldo di Luzio, eds., Variation and Convergence: Studies in Social Dialectology, Walter de Gruyter.
• Abram de Swaan, 2001, Words of the World: The Global Language System, 1st ed., Polity Press.

Graphics arrangement for posters in Arabic & N'Ko

Localization primarily concerns language - translation from a source language to a target language - but also requires attention to cultural dimensions of communication and presentation of images. One aspect that apparently has been overlooked on more than one occasion is the arrangement of graphics when the target language is written - and read - right-to-left (RTL).

An often cited example is advertising translated into Arabic, where "before" (on the left) and "after" (on the right) pictures were not switched in the Arabic version, unintentionally implying the opposite of the visual message the advertisers hoped to convey (one site mentions this happening for a medicine and for laundry detergent).

RTL in ebola materials

International SOS to its credit has various ebola education materials in several languages, including Arabic and N'Ko, which are both written RTL. However these products - whatever the quality of their translations (which I'm not in a position to judge) - have run afoul of the same issue described above: The graphic layouts have not been inverted to correspond with the text direction.

First, ebola awareness posters in Arabic and N'Ko:

Ebola awareness posters in N'Ko (Manding) and Arabic, from International SOS

The graphics in these posters are arranged in exactly the same way as they are for left-to-right languages (like English), which means that the text reads one way, while the images are ordered in the opposite direction. Not ideal - readers can probably figure it out (assuming a certain level of literacy and familiarity with a visual clue like the arrow point, which we take for granted), but why make them work at it? Imagine following instructions or a comic in English with illustrations in panels organized from your right to your left.

But it's easy to fix. Here's the middle section of the N'Ko poster with graphics inverted:

This was quick and dirty, done with MS Paint on a laptop (can anyone who reads N'Ko evaluate it?). A professional effort would use a more sophisticated graphics program (Gimp or Adobe Photoshop) to get the spacings and alignments right and maybe flip some of the individual images. But the text and the illustrated story line here do at least go in the same direction.

Handwashing poster in Arabic from ISOS

And there's more. A handwashing poster in Arabic, again from International SOS (translation by Translators Without Borders), has the images of steps ordered in the direction contrary to how the language is read. It could be redone with the image sequence reversed to RTL and the digits changed to Arabic form (١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠).

Again, I'm not trying to be critical, but these are errors that stand out, and don't require any particular knowledge of the languages or scripts involved to set right.

A lot of good effort and resources went into producing such materials, and for good reasons, but all that gets unnecessarily discounted if such a basic mistake - one well known in advertising, localization, and development communication - is not corrected before dissemination.

But starting from where we are, with the urgency of the epidemic that prompted these efforts behind us, we have the opportunity to more carefully review and revise such materials to prepare them for re-use/re-purposing (per the 2Ds+4Rs). And in the case of layout, to think about establishing a best-practice of producing alternate graphics templates with inverted image order for RTL languages. How can this be done?

Applied linguistics for development workers?

In an article last January in The Guardian's Global Development Professionals Network, Maria May suggests "Six resolutions for aid workers" in 2015: 1. Be the best manager ever; 2. Read; 3. Write; 4. Spend more time in the field [i.e., don't let it slide down the list of priorities]; 5. Walk the walk [development "organizations need to exemplify the change that they are trying to make in society"]; and 6. Renew yourself.

I'd like to suggest a 7th resolution for 2015 - never too late to improve practice - which is particularly important in multilingual contexts commonly encountered in development work in Africa: "Be a little bit of a linguist." What I mean by that is to pay attention to what languages are used and might be used, and how, in all levels of development work - especially on the level of beneficiaries and their communities.

Language, of course, is key to communication, which is central to extension, learning, and collaborative planning and action. And when many languages are used in a community, communication in development becomes more complex, choice of languages becomes a factor, and several social and linguistic issues come into play:

1. Participation: Who's talking? Who's not talking (or understanding)? These are issues even in monolingual communities, but where more than one language is spoken, try to observe what the use of or shift among languages means in terms of who does and doesn't participate fully - or at all. Typically use of an elite language or a language spoken by a majority in the community will favor people in leadership positions. Choice of language may reflect power as much as a desire to reach the most people. 
2. Gender: Related to the previous point, what do women speak and not speak? Women tend not to have as many languages as men, due to lack of formal education of girls, as well as to the opportunities even unschooled men have to travel and interact with speakers of other languages in their region (and beyond). Try to get an idea of what languages women use in homes, community, and local markets, and what gaps there may be for their direct communication with government, extension agencies, development projects, school staff, etc.
3. Interpretation: Where it is necessary to work across more than one language, what is the quality of rendition in the target language(s)? If you don't speak the target language you have to trust the interpreters who do, but don't do so blindly. You may have seen a spoof of movie subtitles where an actor speaks a long piece and the subtitle has one or two words - be alert to shortcut summaries and query the interpreter when s/he gives you one.* In 2010 I sat in on a training of community animal health workers in Moroto, Uganda, who requested a change of interpreter to one who had better command of relevant vocabulary in Karamojong language. If there had not been that alternative, what might have been lost in translation? Check to be sure of the interpreter's confidence in the technical topic(s) being discussed before putting them on the spot to translate for you.
4. Translation: Can you bring talking points translated in the target language to the field? At its most basic level, interpretation is oral and translation written, but development work rarely involves the latter when "local languages" are involved. Yet "pre-translating" key concepts and terminology might be helpful as aids to ensure good interpretation and reduce "slippage" in conveying information. Translation is also a key to localizing ICT4D (see below).
5. Local extension agents: What languages do they speak? I've remarked in the past that a US Peace Corps volunteer may get more language training in one week than the average local extension or development worker gets in an entire career. That may not seem to matter much if they speak the local languages, but even when they do, there is no support to assure the quality of technical expression in those tongues, and very likely such workers are not literate in them (if their formal education was uniquely in a Europhone official language). And often it is the case that local extension workers may be posted in a region of their country where a language(s) they are not so familiar with are spoken
6. Local radio: What languages do they use? In my experience in West Africa, community radio stations split their programming among whatever languages are spoken by people living within their broadcast radius. With expertise across languages (including finding ways to express new concepts in them), the staff of a station in an area where you are working could be a valuable partner for both for understanding the sociolinguistic profile of the area and for messaging to reach all groups.
7. ICT4D: Applications, software, and content that do not respond to the linguistic realities of the population will have a limited utility - or utility for a limited number of people. Localization (L10n) involves translation and adaptation to local culture and communication. Projects in information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) and efforts to develop L10n in the same countries would seem to be natural allies with complementary interests, but it may be up to the better funded ICT4D projects to reach out to make this connection.

One by one, such issues may make perfect sense, but even when taken together, the reasons for attention to language as a factor in development have not led to a real understanding of the role of languages in development, or what we might do better in multilingual contexts - and with less-resourced languages - to improve practice and outcomes.

The link between language and development is "largely ignored" according to Ekkehard Wolff. Robert Chaudenson has suggested that the subject of language is "taboo" in development work in Africa. And Birgit Brock Utne noted that foreign donors have a negative view of African multilingualism. This is a problem and we can do better.

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* An episode of interpretation recorded on video in southern Afghanistan, with translated subtitles, is an example of shortcuts or just bad interpretation. There are other dynamics going on in the video, but the segment about midway through with the local elder is worth viewing.

On a similar topic: "Back again. Gates, Rockefeller & African languages" 14 Sep 2006.

Language - a vital & neglected topic in African agricultural development?

Following are some excerpts with minor modifications from the introduction I wrote to comments on a report about agricultural development in Africa several months ago. These are in italics, followed by some comments to put it in a personal perspective:

I see language as an important consideration often - and paradoxically - omitted from discussions on agriculture and rural development in Africa: language and specifically communication about agriculture in farmers' languages and/or local lingua francas. ... The issues of choice of language in development communication, and the implications of those choices for who participates, whose knowledge counts, how well knowledge that is exchanged is understood and appropriated, etc. [have] implications for analysis or action. ...

I think it is fair to say that only in Africa (esp. sub-Saharan) is it the general pattern that the languages dominant in agricultural research and extension are different from those the farming populations speak as their first languages and even lingua francas. There are various reasons for this of course, but the fact is important, and too central to any effort to communicate about science and technology with farmers to be left on the margins of the discourse, let alone to be totally ignored.

Rural realities as concern language and linguistic diversity are not unknown to scholars and practitioners concerned with agriculture in Africa, of course, and many of our African colleagues have themselves lived those realities to one degree or another. However, disciplinarily, such language-related issues are alien to agricultural specialists (to a greater extent even than the broad category of social science), and in practice language differences are left to extension agents and/or intermediary farmers in the field to deal with. Moreover, professional incentives, training and education, etc. are all in English, French and Portuguese, not the first languages of agriculture in Africa.

As a consequence there seems to be a linguistic divide with consequences for understanding, transmission and generation of knowledge etc. This issue, which has many unanswered questions but not easy answers, is underresearched, in part because of a disciplinary divide which linguists on the one hand and the range of specialists concerned with agricultural development on the other need to find the will and means to bridge.

I recall working in rural areas and there were many occasions where multiple languages complicated communication or even shaped the way the work was done. At the time it was just one of those things you and your co-workers dealt with. My main counterpart in an animal traction project in the Amlamé district of Togo spoke Ewe as his first language (L1) but the farmers spoke either Kabiye or Akposso as their L1. With a mixture of French and mostly Mina/Ewe, my counterpart could get the messages across. I worked mainly in French and while communication was possible with some of the farmers it was not with the rest. People there were adept at using their "language portfolios" as it were to translate and complete some sort of communication. How much was lost is another matter and I suspect in retrospect that this system is good for the gist but not nuance or detail, and the "devil is in the details" as the saying goes.

It was clear in any event that no one had planned systematically for how communication across languages was to happen - everything sort of depended on extension agents' and farmers' skills in the field.

In working on a forestry project in the Djenné district of Mali, language and ethnicity emerged as issues in deciding which villages to contact for participation in tree planting (the project was just beginning there and it was not possible by any means to go everywhere). The local staff was more comfortable in Bambara than in some other languages, and indeed it was in the Bambara-speaking villages that the work focused (other issues like perception of the readiness of some other groups to reliably participate in tree planting were also expressed - it is hard to sort out the different factors, but that would have been important to do).

The multiplicity of languages is sometimes pointed at as a problem in Africa, but I think that misses the point. In fact it is not the multilingualism that is the issue but the fact that no few if any (as far as I know) discussing how to best work in the linguistic environment.

At the same time, the skill of Africans generally in facilitating communication across languages (which has been discussed in the literature on African languages) may be obscuring the need for more systematic attention to the issue.

It was interesting to note that some researchers with ICRISAT and IITA who had to follow up on field trials with farmers by means of a questionnaire decided to translate the questionnaires into the farmers' languages (Bambara in Mali for sorghum trials I believe, and Hausa in central Niger for cowpea trials). Having one or many field agents translate the questionnaire from French each time it was administered was obviously going to introduce all sorts of unknowns into the quality of the data. The research need for greater precision led to the obvious choice to communicate in the farmers' languages.

So, one wonders, what about the way field agents translate extension information day-to-day?

It took me a while to really catch on to this issue, even though I have worked on language as well as rural development. Which has me wondering why - was I just slow or what? I do think now, as I indicated in the excerpts quoted above, that part of it is a disciplinary culture and divide issue: the issue was agriculture or forestry, and the foreign experts and the research/extension systems function in French (in those countries). Language, or optimizing communication in specific languages, were not something that entered into the discourse.

This gets into speculation for the reasons, but the main point I'm trying to make is that language is a big deal and there hasn't been enough thought given or research done on how big a deal it is, in what precise ways, and how to best address it. Discussing new approaches and techniques for agriculture in Africa, and especially discussing dissemination of knowledge about these, without engaging the issue of language seems to me to be a mistake we don't have to keep making.

Anyway, this is an issue that I've mentioned before (for instance, Sept. 14, 2006) and will come back to periodically.

Sidebar improvements

I've made some more changes on the sidebar, which hopefully is more useful now.