Parallel corpora as tools for developing the indigenous languages of South Africa, with special reference to Venda

Abstract

This article shows how parallel corpora can be used as tools for developing the indigenous languages of South Africa. Parallel corpora provide a strategic means to fast-track the development of modern terminologies, bilingual dictionaries and glossaries for the indigenous African languages. The article focuses on the issue of translation equivalents. The analysis of translation equivalents is based on the English-Venda Parallel Corpus, which is a pilot project of the Special Language Corpora for African Languages (SpeLCAL) aimed at developing special language corpora for the nine official African languages of South Africa. The analysis of translation equivalents is conducted with Multiconcord, a concordancer developed jointly by the Lingua project and the University of Birmingham.