South Africa - Culture

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

South Africa is known as the rainbow nation. This is a result of the rich abundance of cultures that our country is blessed to have. With this rich abundance of culture comes a variety of different languages. 11 official languages and several foreign languages. This makes communicating in our country fairly difficult if the person you are speaking to is not English or speaking the same language as you. So I am going to design a software solution to be used in IT to be used by learners. The program will translate Afrikaans to English and vice versa. This will help learners who do not understand any of the two languages, as it will translate piece the learner does not understand to the learner's choice of language (Afr or Eng). The advantage of this will be that students will be able to take a word/sentence/paragraph that they do not understand and translate it into their preferred language. I will also design it so that popular terms and greetings can be translated for the use of the person. This program will help bridge the language gap in our country.

INVESTIGATION:

The method most commonly used to translate English into Afrikaans or vice versa, is the use of a dictionary which first of all has a price that is considered high and therefore not everyone can afford it and the other problem with using a dictionary is the time used to look up a word in the dictionary. The other problem with using dictionaries is that they don't have all the words needed and for some words they have many different words that can be used in different tenses or in different context which makes it confusing for a person who is new to the language and doesn't know which word to pick for the sentence he/she is constructing. The areas that my software wants to address are that is to save time and have an understanding of the word when it is used in an English sentence and then converted to Afrikaans sentence. To create the language program converter I will need to have some understanding of the language. I can also make use of the internet that can help me translate sentences that I don't know into to Afrikaans and I can also make use of a dictionary and this is because if I make use of a dictionary for the basic words then users of my program won't have to so I will be doing the hard work for them so they don't have to and they can translate these words quickly and easily. The people that will use my program will be people in schools and tourists as well as the odd businessman; this will be any gender between the age of about 16 and 35 years old. People who use my program won't need to be very smart or have experience in using translator programmes as it will be very easy to use and very efficient.

DEMOGRAPHICS:

With about 6 million native Afrikaans speakers in South Africa, or 13.3 percent of the population, it is the third most spoken mother tongue in the country. It has the widest geographical and racial distribution of all official languages, and is widely spoken and understood as a second or third language. It is the majority language of the western half of South Africa--the provinces of the Northern Cape and Western Cape--and the primary language of the coloured and white communities. In neighbouring Namibia, Afrikaans is spoken in 11 percent of households, mainly concentrated in the capital Windhoek and the southern regions of Hardap and Karas. Widely spoken as a second language, it is a lingua franca of Namibia.

While the number of total speakers of Afrikaans is unknown, estimates range between 15 and 23 million.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans

With about 50 million people living in South Africa:

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_pop_totl&idim=country:ZAF&dl=en&hl=en&q=how+many+people+live+in+south+africa#met=sp_pop_totl&idim=country:ZAF

But the majority of South Africans speak one of the 11 official languages that SA has. And this means the majorities of South Africans do not know or understand Afrikaans. My program will allow them to get a basic understanding of the language as most do speak English.

Illiteracy statistics:

* Nearly a billion people will enter the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names and two thirds of them are women. And they will live, as now, in more desperate poverty and poorer health than those who can. They are the world's functional illiterates--and their numbers are growing.