Lanfrica and AfricArXiv Announce Strategic Partnership
of African language resources in Africa including initiatives related to natural language processing and indigenous language dissemination.
Language Diversity
AfricArXiv’s Contribution to African Research Visibility During the Pandemic
AfricArXiv is committed to increasing access and visibility to African research through our open access portal. With our no-cost publishing for researchers, we are confident that African research will be more visible and build an active and accessible community of researchers to strengthen their research knowledge collaboratively.
Fostering Multilingualism in African Scholarship Through Digital Tools
There are several initiatives to foster African languages in schools and also universities such as African languages studies, natural language processing, and translations among others. Here is Chido Dzinotyiwei who is making it easier to learn indigenous African languages through her initiative, Vambo academy. Chido is a Master of Commerce student at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business (UCT GSB).
African languages to get more bespoke scientific terms
Decolonise Science will employ translators to work on papers from AfricArXiv for which the first author is African, says principal investigator Jade Abbott, a machine-learning specialist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Words that do not have an equivalent in the target language will be flagged so that terminology specialists and science communicators can develop new terms. “It is not like translating a book, where the words might exist,” Abbott says. “This is a terminology-creating exercise.”
Call for Submissions, Decolonise Science
The team at AfricArXiv is proud to announce that we are partnering with Masakhane to build a multilingual parallel corpus of African research from translations of research manuscripts submitted to AfricArXiv. Of the articles submitted, the teams at Masakhane and AfricArXiv will select up to 180 in total for translation.
AI and Seamless Translation of Research in Official African Languages
“With the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP), it should be fairly easy for non-Indonesian [or African] speakers to understand articles written in Indonesian [or African local dialects]. Hence the burden to immediately use English as the main language of science could be lowered.”
Launch of Translate Science
Translate Science is interested in the translation of scholarly literature. Translate Science is an open volunteer group interested in improving the translation of scientific literature. The group has come together to support work on tools, services and advocate for translating science.
In memoriam of Florence Piron
Florence Piron was an anthropologist and ethicist, working as a professor in the Department of Information and Communication at Laval
Decolonising Research Methodologies
AfricArXiv is contributing to decolonisation by promoting an understanding of decolonisation through preprints; accepting preprint submission in both lingua-franca and native languages, and enabling ownership of African research by Africans through establishing of a decentralized, Africa-owned digital repository for the African continent.
Addressing Science Literacy in Africa Through Open Access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online,