From A-Town to ATL: The Politics of Translation in Global Hip Hop Culture

This article examines the linguistic and cultural tensions in global Hip Hop culture through an analysis of the performance of Gsann, an emcee from the Tanzanian Hip Hop crew X Plastaz, at the 2009 Black Entertainment Television (BET) Hip Hop Awards in Atlanta. Gsann\u27s rhymes in Swahili, his emphasis on religion, and his global travels distinguished him from his African American colleagues in the cipha. At the same time, the decision by the BET producers to translate Gsann\u27s Swahili rhymes into English has to be seen within the longer history of cultural and linguistic politics in Tanzania and the United States. Thrown into the primetime spectacle of the BET Awards, Gsann\u27s African roots became quickly incorporated into American Hip Hop culture, dominated by African Americans. As this case study of an artist from Tanzania shows, Hip Hop\u27s global journey has brought together artists from around the world without eliding their cultural and linguistic differences

A corpus-based survey of four electronic Swahili-English Bilingual dictionaries

In this article we survey four different electronic bilingual dictionaries for the language pair Swahili-English. Aided by a data-driven morphological analyzer and part-of-speech tagger, we quantify the coverage of the dictionaries on large monolingual corpora of Swahili. In a second series of experiments, we investigate how applicable the dictionaries are as a tool in the development of a machine translation system, by evaluating bilingual coverage on the parallel SAWA corpus. At the same time we attempt to consolidate the dictionaries into a unified lexicographic database and compare the coverage to that of its composite parts

Oh, you, bird

Ngoma (a Swahili word which literally means ‘drum’) are happenings during which music, dance and song act together to realize performances related to the most important rites of the Swahili communities’ cycle of social life. All the ngoma performances reproduced here are ‘planned performances’ which means that they were not recorded during the rituals to which they belong. They were recorded in order to complete a PhD research which was based on contemporary times.The Verba Africana series publishes video recording of African verbal arts on CDRom's, DVD’s and the Internet. This series responds to the increasing need for new electronic tools that integrate the written and audio-visual materials for research, teaching and learning of African languages and oral literatures. The video recording of oral genres, such as poems, songs and tales, is integrated into the presentation of relevant aspects (language, form, content, performance, literary, social and historical context). The videos and the accompanying material (short information and full articles) allow researchers and the interested public to approach oral literary productions as ‘total event’.NWO, The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Researc

New Roles for African Languages with the New Electronic Media

Mass communication is not new in Africa. Until the mid-20th century aural surrogate languages were used to convey messages which would immediately reach many listeners and which could even be transmitted when the telephone line was interrupted, in particular in Western and Central Africa. The comprehension of these languages depended on the mastership of the spoken language and basically all speakers could understand messages transferred by drum, gong or whistle. With the introduction of writing and printed literature a division emerged according to which certain types of written/printed information were restricted to non-African languages or available also in African languages. While basically all types of literature can be printed or imported in English or French, the production (or import) of literature in African languages is basically restricted to religious texts and to fiction, but hardly any non-fiction. Letter-writing to family members overseas was for a long time the only type of written communication carried out � if at all � in African languages. The new media bring the chances of significant changes in the choice of languages for written information. While making books is expensive, the production of websites is fairly cheap. This offers the chance to produce written texts in African languages which formerly could not be published for economy reasons

DARTS-ASR: Differentiable Architecture Search for Multilingual Speech Recognition and Adaptation

In previous works, only parameter weights of ASR models are optimized under fixed-topology architecture. However, the design of successful model architecture has always relied on human experience and intuition. Besides, many hyperparameters related to model architecture need to be manually tuned. Therefore in this paper, we propose an ASR approach with efficient gradient-based architecture search, DARTS-ASR. In order to examine the generalizability of DARTS-ASR, we apply our approach not only on many languages to perform monolingual ASR, but also on a multilingual ASR setting. Following previous works, we conducted experiments on a multilingual dataset, IARPA BABEL. The experiment results show that our approach outperformed the baseline fixed-topology architecture by 10.2% and 10.0% relative reduction on character error rates under monolingual and multilingual ASR settings respectively. Furthermore, we perform some analysis on the searched architectures by DARTS-ASR.Comment: Accepted at INTERSPEECH 202