Not really much of a surprise there, but apparently Equatorial Guinea's Teodor Obiang Nguema wants to do better than the 97% "win" he had in the last election. His perfectionism is a bit out of control. Those who don't suffer from attempting to do better are the BBC as they had their correspondent in Ghana chiming in about this election in Equatorial Guinea. Not only are these in two different countries in two different regions of Africa, but I'm curious if Caspar Leighton even speaks Spanish or just assumed that they speak English in Guinea after phoning in commentary he probably gleaned from Wikipedia.
Windows 7 - 10 African Languages
Rebecca talks about Microsoft's plans to have their latest operating system available in multiple local African languages. Pretty cool overall, but we'll have to pass judgment in awhile on this as it's not slated to happen until the year after next.
Programming Language Popularity
Jon breaks down what seem to be the most popular programming languages in Africa, according to some Google Insights stats. Thankfully he qualifies at the very beginning that these are just a starting place and not absolutely definitive. Good to state as Google stats for Africa are sketchy at best. It's really hard to tell who all those queries are and things could be skewed a great degree one way or another given that a lot of IPs for African users show up as somewhere in Europe due to where the VSAT connections touch down to terra firma.
Moses Kemibaro gets a real taste of proper broadband in Kenya. Honestly, I'd be happy to get the speeds he was experiencing in San Francisco!
For those unaware "mzungu" means "white person" in Kiswahili. Tumwijuke relates a number of quotes she's heard from white friends in Uganda. I have to admit that I never get tired of posts like these because even when North Americans/Europeans mean well, we still blunder in to saying things like these.
The U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, Mike Ranneberger... [drumroll] has started using Twitter. First the US Embassy in Kinshasa and now this. Twitter knows no freakin' bounds!
Kiswahili Tech Projects are Falling Apart
Good article talking about all the issues in creating a local African language version of software and other technology. I know the pains all too well and as the article points out, people often end up using the English (or French) versions which does little to motivate Microsoft or anyone else to bother in the first place. Damn you, chicken and egg!
I read the Google Africa blog whenever there is new content, which honestly, isn't that often. For some reason, the fact that their Google Translate can now translate between all its current languages as well as Swahili and Afrikaans hasn't been mentioned there. I mean, this is huge! This is great! This is... reported on an unofficial Google blog?
I assume that a bigger announcement must be coming soon and they're just checking to make sure that all the conditionals are closed in the code before letting everyone know. For instance, three days ago, before the Afrikaans option was in there, I actually had to translate something from Afrikaans to English. I used Dutch for the source language option and magically, it translated fine, which it shouldn't have given the dialectic drift from Dutch at Afrikaans. I can only assume that Google Translate auto-detected the language as Afrikaans, which was lurking somewhere in the background.
There are implications with this that go above and beyond a simple announcement, specifically for Swahili. A year ago, I talked with some of the guys who work on Google's linguistic endeavors and they told me that the required corpus for Swahili machine translation was at 40% of what was needed and that was the highest for any African language. This means that in the last year, there was either a huge batch of pages in Swahili which Google had missed or there was a 250% increase in the amount of Swahili text available on the web. I'm guessing it's some combination of both as well as Google paying something get a dictionary in there because Google really wants to get established in Africa.
Whatever the case, it's quite excellent news for languages in Africa as these are the first two African languages to be included in this system. If you create the tools, you grow the language. Here's to more and soon, although I don't know what this is going to mean to the Kamusi Project...
And now apparently the Google Africa Blog has decided to write about this over a week after the fact. I feel so incredibly ahead of things right now.
I just recently finished reading this article. It's massive. It's longer than the Wikipedia article on Michael Jackson, but of course there is a good reason for this. This article on Wired UK details more points about the internet cables that are being deployed off the coast of East Africa than any other article I have read to date.
I have to be quite honest in that the initial tone of the article is rather paternalistic at first with grand, Stanley-esque ways of explaining things such as "Somalia, the planet’s most utterly failed state". Thankfully, it gets past all of this and digs right in to the facts such as Kenyans paying $2,300 a month for a duplex satellite connection with one megabit of throughput, but 600ms of latency. This means that they're spending a helluva lot of money for a meager pipe that takes over a half a second for each single bit of data to transmit. Given that even a lean page has 50000 bytes of data that is not a fast connection whatsoever. This is one of the reasons that we're seeing such a fanfare about these new connections. They will be the first time that East Africa will be connected to an internet that more closely resembles the rest of the world and at a price that will be much, much more affordable (although not at first of course.) And with the cable transmitting at 1.28 terabits per second (or 16,800 megabytes per second if my math is correct) that should be some pretty decent throughput.
All of this is not coming cheaply. Seacom (the entity that the article mostly talks about) is investing $650 million USD in the project which goes to show why the TEAMS project isn't faring as well given that it's working with a sixth of that to lay its cable.
Teams doesn’t appear to have a website. It also doesn’t appear to have a dedicated office, telephone number, email address or anything else one might reasonably expect. But work is definitely underway.
From the history of the projects, the article then delves in to the technical elements of how cable is laid, which I really thought was just a process of dumping it on the ocean floor. It happens that it's just a tad bit more complex than that:
Deep below the waves somewhere off the coast of Africa, a bright-yellow six tonne box-shaped object, about the size of a small military tank and bristling with wires, lights and gadgetry, is trying to take hold of a submarine cable lying on the seabed. This is the Tyco Resolute’s remote operated vehicle, or ROV – and one of the coolest toys imaginable. It has rubberised tracks to drive about on the ocean floor as well as thrusters on its sides, enabling it to fly like an undersea helicopter.
Then it gets in to Kai Wulff. I would warrant that while Kenyans are probably happy to see that they're getting faster internet in the very near future, they're probably not all that thrilled that a German is going to be the one in charge of it. And Wulff doesn't mess around: "the first large-scale customer of Seacom in Kenya, having secured a 15-year 10Gbps slot on the cable for a cool $100 million." KDN (Wulff's company) is apparently also in the process of "rolling out fibre links to Kampala in Uganda, building redundant rings around Kenya, linking into Tanzania, Rwanda and other countries." meaning that in a good way, this map will need some updates.
All of this is just a snippet of the article though. If you haven't read it yet and have any interest at all in these projects, I would highly recommend taking a look; allusions to cable engineers looking like Antonio Banderas and all.
I can't see it at the moment and apparently others can't either, but Facebook now has a language option for Swahili as was reported on the BBC.
Obviously, this is pretty great news and while one could ask, "Why is this necessary? English is a common language anywhere Swahili is spoken." it misses the point that having the ability to use a language spoken by 110 million people (Wikipedia differs on the amount) is most important. That's actually a lazy myth that everyone speaks English in addition to Swahili as not everyone does. Yes, it's common, but it isn't ubiquitous, thus this Facebook option (as well as Maneno's [shameless plug]) are crucial to removing linguistic barriers. Also language is a key part of culture and identity. If you don't believe this, then you probably live in the US...
That 110 million speakers figure is impressive, but given the generally paltry internet connectivity of Eastern African, that figure diminishes a great deal. Of course, this is changing. Whether Facebook realizes it or not, positioning themselves with language options such as Swahili and eventually Hausa/Zulu is going to have them at the ready for whenever higher speed internet does reach a greater part of population. I'm sure that they are very aware of this positioning though, just like a slew of other companies including Microsoft, Google, and Nokia who know that the one billion people of Africa are the last huge market left in the world. While I cringe at the forthcoming advertisements littered with spears, huts, and lions, at the same time lets keep our fingers crossed that we're on the verge of shifting from an Aid Africa to an Africa that is truly part of proper world trade.
By way of an update, all of this news is premature. After having it explained as to how you actually turn on this language version, I saw that it's about 80% complete. So in other words, once you find it and turn it on, your experience may be mixed. Hopefully all the publicity will get the version to 100%, but in the meantime, it's a lot like a new car that's missing its doors. Hopefully BBC will let us know when it's actually done.
Since setting up the Translation Assistant on this site, I've been chomping at the bit for more Google functions in more African languages as the Assistant only functions in the Colonial languages of Africa. That bums me out, man. According to folks at the 'Plex, the only one that's close is Swahili and the body of text needed for full-blown machine translation is only at around 40% completed or so. That's with a pretty decent blogging scene in Swahili as well as a Wikipedia in Swahili with about 11,000+ entries. So, you can just imagine how it is with other languages on the continent... That also bums me out, man, but there is hope.
Today Google announced one small step in the right direction to get more Swahili functionality on Google's systems. This is just the "search suggestion" tool and all told, it's a small thing. But, this is only the second African language to get this functionality; the first being Amharic at the start of this year. Yeah, I know, it's not machine translation, but it's something and as I'm working with two translators on a full-blown Lingala and Fula version of Maneno, it's nice to know that a big, mighty company such as Google is putting forth even the tiniest bit of effort to show that they are interested in such things. It's these such things that might help them win against the encroaching big blue monster.
One small side note in that folks should notice that in addition to the standard French translation that appears after the English, there is also a translation in Swahili. I've been really curious to know if the French and Swahili are just machine generated versions or done by someone who actually speaks the language. Anybody have feedback on that?
Word around the way has come to me that the US Department of Homeland Security, is specifically seeking out translators for Kinyarwanda, an official language of Rwanda as well as one that is spoken in Uganda and DR Congo. From all accounts, I've heard that this is a rather difficult language to learn. For those who don't know, it is extremely different from other languages in the region, so someone who speaks Swahili or Luganda can't just pick it up as easily as say someone who speaks Spanish learning Italian.
The fact that DHS is looking for translators isn't really a shock. They employ a great many translators of African languages as they apparently place importance in understanding what people in Africa are saying. I'm not sure whether to take it as a good sign that they are now more interested in African languages because they place for importance in Africa due to a new, more enlightened administration or a bad sign that they are now more interested because in having failed at every military incursion in the Middle East, they are going to say that Africa is a new "hotbed of terrorist extremists". I guess time will tell in the matter and let's hope it's not that later assumption.
Like I said, it's not strange that they're looking for translators. At the talk I gave two nights ago, an attendee there mentioned that a friend worked for DHS translating Akan if I remember correctly. What is weird about all of this is that DHS specifically asked Amnesty International if they knew of anyone. The implications of this are just bizarre. I suppose in one sense, DHS just assumes that AI would know of some folks because they have operated in Rwanda. In another sense, I'm wondering if DHS is just pitching this out to a great many NGOs that work in Africa because they went and tried Craigslist or some other ad website only to get no response. Whatever the case, it has to be one of the more bizarre hiring methods I've seen by a governmental agency in the US.
As I was traveling a bit last weekend, taking the metro, train, and a bus connection in California, I watched a number of kids riding along with me and using their mobiles in a way that I usually don't in that they were texting heavily. Instead of blathering on the phone like so many people I know usually do (including myself at times), they just kept pinging text messages back and forth during their whole ride. Now, these kids had some of the latest mobiles with touchscreens and ridiculous ringtones that would play a full song when they had an incoming message, but what I was amazed at was how able they were with texting. One was using T9 and the other was using multi-tap to put in their messages. Both were just as fast as each other and were able to do this with one hand, whereas I need both my thumbs in there for any amount of speed.
But what really got me was that despite all the fancy junk that keeps getting slapped on to mobiles, it keeps coming back to the basics that I've seen in Africa in that everyone really wants a two-way text pager. In Western countries, we keep buying new mobiles that are basically worthless gadgets. I know there have been cries by a lot of folks to offer a mobile that is a simple B&W screen, rugged, and has endless battery life. While I think we all regret tossing out older mobiles (I miss my S40), people living in Sub-Saharan Africa are a lot smarter, hanging on to, fixing and continuing to use these older mobiles. Sure, there is the issue that it's done out of a cost issue, but really, when it comes down to it, a Nokia 1200 or a Nokia 3410 have to be some of the best phones suited for these areas, especially Central Africa.
It's not just the Africans using these types of phones I might add. People working for the UN and other NGO's fall back on them as well. They stand up to the environment, perform well, and hang on to battery life for a long time in an area where power can be scarce. Good luck keeping an iPhone running anywhere except in a capital like Kinshasa, Kampala, or Kigali. Of course, this isn't lost on foreign-based companies like CCT (Congo China Telecom) who offer a very simple phone for $20 USD that meets all the criteria of these older mobiles that keep circulation the region. What I regret even more than selling my S40 was not picking up one of these phones. While they are locked in to CCT, they're a very interesting example of the innovation that takes place in Sub-Saharan Africa due to environmental needs rather than by consumerist want. The big GSM Association conferences may take place in Barcelona, but the place where the most useful implementation of mobile technology is happening, is in Sub-Saharan Africa. I'll bet that whatever Web 3.0 application start popping up in the next couple of years will be based on something that happened in there first.
The always insightful giraffe wrote about a talk given by Ory Okolloh awhile back at TED Africa. The talk was interesting as she brought up the very important issue of perception. She was pointing out that because we in the West have a view of Africa as being the horrid, asshole of the world (that's from Apocalypse Now, not her) type of place that it ultimately fulfills this idea. Watch the video and you'll see her explain it better than I can summarize because she shows that it is very easy to view the West in just as bad a light as it is Africa.
Curious to expand on this, I took a look at BBC News yesterday as Monday is typically a big news days. I did a screen capture of BBC News - Americas and BBC News - Africa. Now, I happen to like BBC News a great deal as they and Reuters are some of the few large news outlets that really cover Africa with any depth. With that in mind, take a look at the headlines. I did a rough calculation. On the Americas page, about 81% of the articles were good news as compared to 19% bad news. For Africa, it was 80% bad news to 20% good. See a slight issue there?
This portrayal of Africa is unfair. Yes, a lot of bad things happen there like Malaria and the LRA, but there are good things happening there as well, except that you just don't hear about them as there is seemingly no outlet. It really is easier to report about the bad things and when you report about the bad, it's easier to sell things, which in this case is the constant need for aid to poor, poor Africa. I'm not saying that African countries don't need aid, but they don't need it as it currently is packaged as this system has shown to do very little in the decades since Colonial Rule was ousted in the continent.
Big Media really has little vested interest in showing a different side to Africa. Aid groups also have little interest because despite their altruism, if things don't look bad, the donations don't come in and admittedly some aid groups are far, far worse with this than others. This is one of the reasons why we've been working to create Maneno.
