Found in Translation

To Unfrie nd, to De frie nd, or to Re move Conne ctions?
In 2009, the word unfriend was chosen as the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the
Year. Major media outlets did stories on the influence of Facebook, attributing the word to the social
media giant. However, in reality, the word unfriend was never an official Facebook term. Facebook
used remove connection instead, but the term unfriend became part of common parlance. Another
advantage of the phrase remove connection? It’s much easier to translate!
Òjò, j , Ójó
You probably take it for granted that you can type on a keyboard in your native
language. But what if you looked down at the keys and saw only foreign
characters? English speakers are lucky to have such a keyboard-friendly
language. Just twenty-six characters, ten digits, and a handful of punctuation
and other marks were the only characters that had to fit on the original
English-language typewriter. European languages like French, German, or
Danish, with just a few special characters for umlauts or accented letters, were
also fairly easy to accommodate.
But what about a language like Chinese—which has sixty thousand
characters, thirty-five hundred of which are used in daily communication? Or
South Asian languages like Thai and Indic languages? Cyrillic languages like
Russian and Greek? And what about the right-to-left languages like Hebrew
and Arabic?
When computers came into fashion, developers quickly found solutions for
major languages by creating virtual keyboards within operating systems that
could be mapped to the actual physical keyboards. In other words, typing on
keys with Latin letters would produce Russian, Thai, or Hebrew characters on
the screen. For languages like Chinese, programs were developed that allowed
for screen-based selection of characters that were filtered on the basis of
pronunciation or other characteristics.

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So what about all the other languages? Consider languages like Yorùbá,
Ìgbo, and Hausa, which are spoken by sixty-three million people in Nigeria.
And these are just three of the more than two hundred languages of Nigeria
that have a written form. (If you think two hundred written languages is a lot,
just consider the fact that the total number of languages spoken in Nigeria is a
mind-boggling 510.) These three languages, most of which are based on a
Latin alphabet system, do not lend themselves to a keyboard because of special
letters and a plethora of diacritical marks above or below the characters. For
instance, using the Yorùbán álífáb tì (alphabet), the word ojo with different
diacritics could mean any of the following: “rain” (òjò), “day” ( j ), or
“uncourageous” (ójó). As recently as just a few years ago, authors writing in
Yorùbá had to type out texts on an English typewriter or computer and then
pass the texts on to secretaries, who would then add the missing marks by hand.
Adé Oyégb la and his partner Olúkáy deé Olúw leé wanted to find a
solution to this problem. Inspired in the late 1990s by their inability to find a
keyboard to adequately create business cards in their native language of
Yorùbá, they decided to create an input system that would cover not just their
mother tongue, but all the written languages of Nigeria.
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They created a
keyboard that was very similar to the English keyboard, to make the transition
from the familiar environment as easy as possible.
In addition, they also provided access to all of Nigeria’s necessary extra
letters by creating a second set of shift keys with which users were able to add
diacritical marks to any of the characters. The resulting product, the K nyin
Multilanguage Keyboard, is used by various government agencies,
universities, religious groups, and translators. Even companies like Dell and
HP are looking into the underlying drivers that make the use of these
keyboards possible.
Oyégb la explains his motivation for creating and distributing the new
keyboards as follows: “The very survival of these languages is at stake.” He
believes that improving the ability of his fellow Nigerians, many of whom
have been computer illiterate, to type in their native languages on a computer
will go far toward preserving their culture, their identity, and their most
fundamental mode of communication.
As translators, we see yet another benefit. The easier it gets for people to
communicate in their native languages, the more readily translators can
transfer information into and out of those languages, thus connecting a country
and its people to the rest of the world.

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