Machine Translation of Low-Resource Spoken Dialects: Strategies for Normalizing Swiss German

The goal of this work is to design a machine translation (MT) system for a low-resource family of dialects, collectively known as Swiss German, which are widely spoken in Switzerland but seldom written. We collected a significant number of parallel written resources to start with, up to a total of about 60k words. Moreover, we identified several other promising data sources for Swiss German. Then, we designed and compared three strategies for normalizing Swiss German input in order to address the regional diversity. We found that character-based neural MT was the best solution for text normalization. In combination with phrase-based statistical MT, our solution reached 36% BLEU score when translating from the Bernese dialect. This value, however, decreases as the testing data becomes more remote from the training one, geographically and topically. These resources and normalization techniques are a first step towards full MT of Swiss German dialects.Comment: 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 7-12 May 2018, Miyazaki (Japan

Negotiating a nuanced task-based communicative syllabus of Setswana as an additional language

South Africa promotes multilingualism as one of the means for creating a common national identity in the country but with regard to the teaching of indigenous African languages as additional languages, there is a dearth of teaching material for carrying out this ideal. This article is about negotiating the design of a nuanced communicative Setswana syllabus for learners to whom Setswana is an additional language. The insight gained from data collection obtained through literature review, a questionnaire, and semi-structured individual and group interviews, is used to negotiate the design of the syllabus in question. The syllabus is nuanced by making it involve an overt teaching of grammar and critical language awareness. The study could be used to inform syllabus design for teaching South African indigenous languages as additional languages and to help promote the use of multilingualism South Africa seeks for creating a common national identity.Keywords: syllabus design, teaching methodology, task-based, additional language, Setswana, adult learners, needs analysi

Confronting Afrikaans diction challenges in non-Afrikaans mother tongue choirs

This study is an initial attempt to identify the most common Afrikaans diction challenges experienced by non-Afrikaans mother tongue speaking choirs, and to explore means of confronting these challenges. No dedicated source exists for choral diction in Afrikaans as a foreign language. This study reviews personal views and literature from various fields that would inform several key elements necessary for the creation of such a source. The primary data for this study was collected through study questionnaires, completed by expert choral conductors who are highly regarded for their success in teaching and performing Afrikaans diction in non-Afrikaans mother tongue speaking choirs, in performance settings such as the ATKV-Applous Choir Competition. Through its proposition of methods for the improvement of Afrikaans diction practices in the non-Afrikaans choral setting, the study promotes the prolific composition of Afrikaans choral literature, and its ubiquitous inclusion in choral repertoire both in South Africa and abroad

Introducing Tlhalosi ya Medi ya Setswana: The Design and Compilation of a Monolingual Setswana Dictionary

This paper presents the design elements of a recently published monolingual Setswana dictionary, Tlhalosi ya Medi ya Setswana (Otlogetswe 2012), the fourth main Setswana monolingual dictionary to appear. The paper situates the dictionary within a recent, but growing Setswana monolingual dictionary tradition whose roots may be traced to 1976 when M.L.A. Kgasa's Thanodi ya Setswana ya Dikole was published. However, before this date, the development of Setswana lexicography lies wholly in a bilingual dictionary tradition which dates back to the 1800s. The paper also discusses the different features of Tlhalosi ya Medi ya Setswana demonstrating that it possesses some dictionary features which are not found in previous Setswana dictionaries such as frequency information, phonemic transcription and extensive cross-referencing.Keywords: Tlhalosi, thanodi, dictionary, setswana, monolingua

Conceptions of language and literacy and the role of digital technologies in Home, First and Second Additional language lessons: a case study of 6 grade four teachers in South African state schools.

Research into classroom practices in South Africa has highlighted various disjunctures between the conceptions of language and literacy evident in the CAPS curriculum documents, teachers' pedagogical approaches, and the multilingual reality of classrooms in South Africa. This research study asks whether the current promotion of digital technologies in classrooms, so evident in both South Africa and in the world at large, might be in danger of similar disjunctures. The study explores teachers' conceptions of language and literacy across English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa in the Grade 4 classrooms of two schools in the Hout Bay area, examining how these play out in their accounts of their daily teaching practice and whether and how they facilitate the successful integration of digital technology into language lessons. The study draws on Blommaert's ‘artefactual ideology of language' (2008), combined with the concepts of an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1984) and language ideologies (McKinney, 2016), as well as Durrant and Green's (2000) digital literacy theoretical frameworks. While teachers are exhorted to promote the use of technology in their lessons and the rhetoric of the “the fourth industrial revolution” adds to the pressures, there are many factors involved in the uptake of technology in schools - perhaps the most important being the existing practices and ideologies of the teacher themselves. The study focuses specifically on six Grade 4 teachers' accounts of their conceptions and practices in relation to the CAPS curriculum, in order to analyse how teachers manage the much higher language and literacy levels of the curriculum specifications when learners move from Foundation Phase (Grades R-3) to Intermediate Phase (Grade 4-6) in language and literacy lessons, and also on how their uses of technology align or not with the specifications in the curriculum. Despite both schools being positive towards technology, it was soon apparent that CAPS specifications and teachers' conceptions of language and literacy (which leant towards the artefactual ideology of language and literacy) did not align easily with the kinds of tasks and assessments that are called for in using digital technologies (which lean towards agentic and critical engagements with texts). In addition, despite most of the teachers being highly critical of the CAPS curriculum, the study found that most of the teachers do stick closely to the CAPS specifications in both the Home Language and Additional Language classes and that these perceptions, combined with existing ideologies present in CAPS curriculum documents, are influencing their teaching practices and approach to using technology in their lessons