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http://www2.technologyreview.com/articles/05/04/issue/ feature_gp_safrica.asp?trk=nl
South Africa has a language problem. Its 46 million people speak 11 official tongues. Enter the Human Language Technology (HLT) unit at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoriaâone of the largest R&D, technology, and innovation institutions in Africa.
HLT researchers are developing innovative ways to give more people, from diverse backgrounds, access to knowledge. âIn dealing with South African needs, we have to take into account the level of literacy of users, their technical sophistication, and cultural factors,â says Marelie Davel, the computer scientist who coheads the HLT research group.
One of the HLT unitâs biggest success stories is a highly efficient system for the creation of pronunciation dictionaries. Davel explains that the system has been tested on a number of South African languages, including isiZulu, Setswana, Afrikaans, and Sepedi. Researchers have also developed a speech synthesis system for isiZulu, which is the first language of more South Africansâ24 percentâthan any other. The system, which is now being tested, enables people with only a reading knowledge of isiZulu to communicate orally with native speakers.
South Africaâs other major area of innovation involves communication of another sort: the collaborative process that is the heart of the open-source-software movement. More than 80 percent of the countryâs six-billion-rand (about $1 billion) annual spending on software and licensing goes to foreign companies, according to the Shuttleworth Foundationâs Go Open Source campaign. This reliance on proprietary hardware and software hinders the development of South Africansâ information technology skills and closes off opportunities for economic growth...........
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