Johannesburg, 01 Mar 2004
Many South Africans have a tendency to regard English as the primary language of socio-economic mobility. Government language policy, however, recognises a total of 11 official languages in the country. In June last year, the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology set in motion the national language policy framework which will provide for the establishment of a South African Languages Act and a government department for language.
There is a clear shift away from the promotion of English to the detriment of all other languages, and South Africans are witnessing the beginning of a drive towards the ongoing development of indigenous language dictionaries, technical terminology and standards.
It is as a result of these imperatives that Verity, a provider of enterprise software that helps organisations maximise return on their intellectual capital investment, has introduced support for local languages into its knowledge management solutions, allowing Internet users to search for content in their home language. The initiative has been endorsed by the Pan South African Language Board.
"The state has committed itself to taking practical and positive steps to elevate the status and advance the use of the indigenous languages of our country," says Garth Wittles, district manager for Verity in SA. "Unfortunately, African countries tend to be the last to enjoy any specific attention when it comes to localisation of IT solutions. However, with the government`s determination to promote linguistic diversity and multilingualism, business can no longer afford to ignore the need for local language support."
The government will be translating important documents into all 11 languages and introducing multilingual publications on government Web sites. Verity`s support for these languages will give people the ability to access this information in their language of choice, and also to view the content in that language.
"What we are talking about is removing barriers to information and enabling true access that makes information available to the population as a whole, thus ensuring comprehension and enabling participation," notes Wittles.
"It`s an important development considering that it will soon be possible to conduct official business with the South African government via the Internet, once the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) launches `Project Gateway`, which will make government information and services available online."
The introduction of what Verity calls "internationalisation" into its K2 Enterprise and Ultraseek solutions comes as a response to the globalisation of the world economy, which is requiring companies to sell in more than one language if they are to stay ahead of the competition.
According to research by Computer Economics, the number of non-English Web pages has already surpassed that of English Web pages.
At the same time, the Yankee Group reports that with the growing demand for enterprise search technology, businesses are asking for multilingual support to complement their primary language modules.
Verity`s internationalisation allows for the deployment of e-business applications, enterprise portals, e-commerce sites and online publishing solutions with multi-language search capabilities.
Describing the technology behind internationalisation, Wittles says language components, known as Verity Locales, are plugged into K2 Enterprise and Ultraseek to enable straightforward integration with the e-business environment. Each Verity Locale is a collection of definition files, data files and DLLs (dynamic link libraries) that determines the behaviour for a certain language, country, region or culture. Each Verity Locale includes advanced linguistic processing for each language and its corresponding internal character set.
In its development of local language support, Verity used a set of sample documents for each language - isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, isiNdebele, Siswati, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, Tshivenda and Xitsonga - provided by the Pan South African Language Board.
"Verity products can be `trained` in each language that is made available, so the biggest challenge for us was to find a suitable set of training material for each language, bearing in mind that some of our indigenous languages do not yet have the terminology for many modern concepts. These languages are in a process of evolution and new vocabulary is being added all the time. Because the solutions are trainable, they can easily evolve with the language itself."
A critical component of Verity`s internationalisation technology is Unicode, a standard that enables users to normalise document and content metadata and provides a single international character-encoding scheme that search administrators can apply across all languages. Verity takes a language-dependent approach to multilingual search and offers support on varying levels based on the use case. Wittles notes that language dependence is key.
"The use of locales that define the grammar and behaviour of each language is critical for providing features such as stemming, tokenisation (breaking strings of characters, words, spaces and punctuation into tokens during the indexing process), noun and noun phrase detection and thesauruses. Without these locales, language-independent systems have difficulty dealing with the intricacies of many languages, such as those that have complex compound words that are a combination of nouns, adjectives and verbs.
"Language-independent systems throw out language - they disregard stemming and word breaks, they deprive the user of the ability to search more than one language and of the ability to determine the language of an untagged document," he cautions.
There is little doubt that the national language policy framework will have a major impact on the corporate world, where many employees are forced to locate and access information in their second or third language.
"Introducing support for local languages elevates the status of those languages by enabling people to transact in their mother tongue. By communicating effectively, people can participate actively in the social, economic and political life of the country," Wittles concludes.
Share