Govt promotes multilingualism
Thabo Mokgola
24 March 2004
The Department of Arts and Culture will launch language initiatives aimed at promoting multilingualism in the country on Tuesday at an event to be attended by Minister Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Deputy Minister Buyelwa Sonjica, King Goodwill Zwelithini and Deputy President Jacob Zuma.
The department said the initiatives were the result of years of consultation, planning and policy development processes since the dawn of democracy in 1994.
"The department, which expects high demand for language services as soon as the SA Languages Bill has been promulgated, wants to ensure that the country has appropriate human resources when the bill is enacted," the department said in a statement.
It said the Language Act will affect all sectors of society from government, business and ordinary members of the public.
Tuesday's events will be kicked off by a colloquium where government leaders, academics, NGO's, traditional leaders, business and other
sectors of society will deliberate on the issue of multilingualism in a democratic South Africa.
The initiatives include a bursary scheme, language research and development centres, as well as the Human Language Technologies, which enables people to interact with computers by using language and speech.
The department said that it had set aside R5-million for the 2004/2005 financial year for the bursary scheme for post-graduate studies in translation, editing, interpreting, Human Language Technologies and language planning.
"Undergraduate studies will be provided for in the 2005/2006 financial-year, and bursaries will be offered to students specialising in Tshivenda, Xitsonga, siSwati and isiNdebele languages."
A further R9-million has been set aside in the 2004/2005 financial year for setting up the language research and development centres, which will focus on the usage and research for the nine indigenous languages, namely, seSotho sa Lebowa, seSotho,
seTswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZulu.
"The centres will be based at institutions of higher learning. One of the key objectives of the language centres will be to ensure the use of indigenous languages for business, politics, research and government information purposes," the department said.
Source: BuaNews
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