I've been an occasional reader of This Is Africa, a news site with stories covering everything from Cairo to Cape Town, for a number of months. But, after clicking on one of their stories, I was surprised to find that a good chunk of the links on their sidebar are in French. Of course, this isn't too much of a surprise. After English, French is the most prevalent European language on the continent. Other European languages, left over from the troubled history of colonialism on the continent, have left their mark, such as Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch (there's also Afrikaans, a language with strong ties to Dutch spoken mainly in South Africa). In the northern part of the continent, Arabic is prevalent - another colonial language, though not a European one. And let's not forget about the rich linguistic diversity of Africa's home grown languages. A Wikipedia article asserts that there are anywhere from 1,250 to 2,100 languages spoken on the continent. Though some of those are the European ones listed above, most aren't. The site lists a number of other languages, such as Somali, Berber, Amharic, Oromo, Swahili, Hausa, Igbo, Fulani and Yoruba, as all having over 10 million speakers in Africa. Given this wide array of languages spoken, it's no surprise that a website aspiring to cover the entire continent would need to use more than one. But this presents a dilemma: what about the readers that don't speak French? Multilingual websites are a challenge, especially for news websites which are constantly updated. Many major news sites opt to center on a single language, with specific stories translated, especially if they are related to certain geographical regions in particular. For instance, a New York Times Magazine story about internet trolls in Russia was translated into Russian, even though most of the site's content is not. In the case of This is Africa perhaps posting articles in parallel languages isn't such a bad idea. And who knows? Maybe it will help some of its readers to brush up on their French skills. |
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