Mammoth Translation Task in South Africa

Volume 6, No. 1
January 2002

Mr. Johann Venter has a background in education at various levels: teaching in high schools, research in general education and curriculum development, as well as in communication in an education department. He is an education specialist in the Communications Section of the Gauteng Department of Education in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he is the Coordinator of Language Services. In his current work, Mr. Venter is mainly involved in translation (especially English into Afrikaans), the writing of articles and brochures for dissemination of information and the coordination of language services in the four official languages used by the education department in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. He holds, amongst others, an MA degree in Afrikaans literature from the University of South Africa and an MEd in Philosophy of Education from the University of Pretoria.

Mr. Venter can be reached at
JohannV@gpg.gov.za.

	Happy New Year!
	Index 1997-2002
	Translator Profiles
	Truth, Love, and Prehistory by Nicholas Hartmann, Ph.D.
	The Profession
	The Bottom Line by Fire Ant & Worker Bee
	Sounding the Language-Elephant's Trumpet— (a guide for intelligent buyers of translation services) by Paul Sutton
	Sounding the Language-Elephant's Trumpet (Cont.) by Paul Sutton
	Literary Translation
	Cultural Elements in Translation—The Indian Perspective by C. Thriveni
	Translation and Culture by Alejandra Patricia Karamanian
	Machine Translation
	Toward Corpus-Based Machine Translation for Standard Arabic by Mathieu Guidère, Ph.D.
	Translator Education
	A Skeleton in the Closet—Teaching Translation in Egyptian National Universities by Moustafa Gabr, FIL
	Translators Around the World
	Mammoth Translation Task Undertaken for Education by Johann Venter
	Science & Technology
	A Translator’s Guide to Organic Chemical Nomenclature XXVI by Chester E. Claff, Jr., Ph.D.
	Caught in the Web
	Web Surfing for Fun and Profit by Cathy Flick, Ph.D.
	Translators’ On-Line Resources by Gabe Bokor
	Translators’ Tools
	Translation Tools Today: A Personal View by Danilo Nogueira
	Translators’ Emporium
	Letters to the Editor
	Translators’ Events
	Call for Papers and Editorial Policies

Mammoth Translation Task

Undertaken for Education

by Johann Venter

n South Africa, at the southernmost point of the African continent, multilingualism is now awakening—at last. Up to the time apartheid was ended, South Africa only had two official languages, namely English and Afrikaans. Now, according to our Constitution, we have eleven official languages in our young democracy. And for the first time the national Department of Education decided that the newly developed curriculum documents (the so-called National Curriculum Statement) for grades 1 to 9 should be translated into the different official languages. Prior to the first democratic election of 1994, these documents would only have been published in English and Afrikaans.

During July 2001, forty translators (four per language) who are speakers of the ten other official languages (English being excluded as the curriculum documents were all developed in English) gathered in Pretoria for four weeks in order to translate the curriculum documents into isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sepedi, Afrikaans, Setswana, Siswati, isiNdebele, Tshivenda, Sesotho and Xitsonga. Except for Afrikaans, which is a Germanic language (and developed mainly from 17th Century Dutch), all the other languages belong to the family of Bantu Languages. (We in South Africa usually refer to these languages as African Languages.)

For all the translators involved this venture has been an enormous challenge. The main reason for this being the fact that many new terms had to be coined in the different languages. This was especially true for the African languages, which do not have the same long tradition of having been actively developed and supported by the State for many years as is the case with Afrikaans.

My sincere wish is that this mammoth task will be to the benefit of all in South Africa. And that multilingualism will not be just an ideal expressed in our Constitution, but that all South Africans will embrace this ideal and work actively in making it a reality in our country. After all: language rights are human rights.