The lack of terminology and language resources for the under-resourced South African languages poses a serious problem for effective communication in specialised fields such as law, education, ...health, agriculture, science, and technology. The ability to use all South African languages in all contemporary fields requires the existence of relevant terminology and resources. The article aims to semi-automatically identify and extract terminology for creating an English, Xitsonga, Siswati, and isiNdebele quadrilingual dictionary. Given parallel texts in the four different languages, we use ParaConc to identify and extract terminology in one language and the corresponding translations in the other languages. In this study, English is used as the source language, while Xitsonga, Siswati, and isiNdebele are the target languages. This process allowed us to identify specific lexical items in the source language (manually) and their translation equivalents in the target languages (automatically). The result was a collection of extracted terminology lists that can be used to compile a specialised quadrilingual dictionary for English and three of the under-resourced languages. We show the usefulness of ParaConc to semi-automatically extract quadrilingual terminology lists, which, by creating quadrilingual dictionaries, will contribute to the development and promotion of multilingualism in South Africa.
Nicknames are common in African societies. In Swati families, the use of nicknames is widespread and almost every member of a family possesses one. The nicknames are given to people in addition to ...their personal names from a young age until adulthood. This paper aims to explore nicknames bestowed on people within Swati families. This study is qualitative and adopts a socio-onomastic approach. The researchers used participant observation to collect data to gain insight into how nicknames are bestowed on family members and to establish their meanings. A total of 51 nicknames were collected and analysed. It was established that nicknames are given based on the socio-cultural traits of the family and society. It was also ascertained that nicknames are derived from an individual's character, physical appearance, prominent people's names, remarkable events, and short forms of personal names. Some nicknames are meaningful while others are meaningless. They are used as informal identities within the family setting and in the community.
When translating texts into a language that lacks relevant terminology, translation equivalence is difficult to achieve, and the accuracy, accessibility and effectiveness of communication of the ...translated texts may be compromised. This article investigated various approaches to the translation of terminology when no direct translation equivalents were available in the target languages. The researchers performed a comparative analysis of strategies applied in the translation of the South African Constitution from English into Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele. Firstly, Voyant tools were used to identify terms in the English version. Secondly, a multilingual concordancer (ParaConc) was employed to extract translation equivalence. ParaConc allows for contrastive studies on aligned corpora. The strategies that were found were borrowing, paraphrasing, derivation and compounding. Paraphrasing, derivation and compounding are productive strategies, because equivalents are formed using the already existing words in the languages which native speakers clearly understand. The use of borrowing revealed a critical need for terminology development work in these languages to avoid transliterating terms from foreign languages in which the meaning is not directly clear to the native speakers. This article also demonstrated the usefulness of computational approaches in identifying terminology and translation techniques in the context of South Africa’s official languages.Contribution The article demonstrates word-formation strategies that were used in the translated South African constitution from English into Xitsonga, Siswati and isiNdebele when no translation equivalents of terminology are available in these target languages.
This study is an analysis of the nature of possession in siSwati from a socio-cultural perspective. The study seeks to uncover how possession is expressed in siSwati and also the socio-cultural ...traits of the Swazi people that are revealed through possession. A written corpus was used to collect the requisite data and the relevant data was subsequently analysed. The study adopted systematic functional linguistic and sociolinguistic approaches to analyse the nature of possession in siSwati
African Languages
M. A. (African Languages)
