In March 2020, just before the Covid19 lockdown, Saide was asked to adapt the KnowHow Early Learning App it had developed for the Roger Federer Foundation for the Malawian context. This included the translation of 20 storybooks into six Malawian languages, in a virtual workshop with six teachers and six language professors we had never met! Dorcas Wepukhulu elaborates.
KnowHow Early Learning is a tablet-based application that encourages and facilitates peer-to-peer learning and collaboration of pre-primary and primary teachers in order to improve their knowledge and skills in early learning methods. The request for the adaptation followed a review of the KnowHow Early Learning content against the key ECD documents for Malawi, which concluded that it is a relevant tool supporting educators in their literacy work.
KnowHow Early Learning is one of the apps and tools on the comprehensive Early Learning Kiosk (ELK) which is a key element of the Roger Federer Foundation’s School Readiness Initiative. It supports the monitoring of children’s progress as they get ready for the first grade, and gives guidance on topics such as parental involvement, supporting transition and using natural playgrounds.
The app content is mainly generic, but it has the facility to automate selective customization for different Southern African Countries. This customisation can be for specific terms or familiar examples of class-room activities
As part of adapting it for Malawi, Saide was asked to facilitate the translation of KnowHow Early Learning storybooks into Chichewa, Citumbuka, Chichewa, Ciyawo, Chitonga, Chinkhonde and Ellomwe.
Due to COVID-19 pandemic, Saide elected to work remotely observing the lockdown and travel restrictions, with a goal to translate 20 storybooks and 68 keywords into the six languages mentioned above.
Preliminary, process undertaken involved dialogue with professors from the African Languages and Linguistics Department and Centre for Language Studies of the University of Malawi. The engagement outlined the KnowHow Early Learning project and the scope of work that was going to be done.
Through the Resource Centre for the Blind, six primary school teachers were recruited to translate materials into six languages. Each teacher was paired with a university professor from the Centre for African Languages at the University of Malawi, with the pair being responsible for the translation and quality assurance of the storybooks into a particular language. Each member was to translate half the storybooks and then quality assure the other half.
An orientation session for the 12 participants was held via Zoom to develop their capacity to translate storybooks and key words into the word template document supplied. Immediately after the virtual meeting, the translators formed a WhatsApp group, while each pair was encouraged to dialogue around their language translation but also to reach out to us if they needed help to reach a consensus. This was important to achieve quality assured translations that would support the early literacy of children in Malawi.
As a trial, the 12 participants translated one of the 20 stories, Chicken and Millipede from English, with the support of the English Pdf and Chinyanja. This helped to determine how effective the process would be and the quality of the work.
In total, the translators took approximately two weeks to translate, swop the translations and quality assure them. They then dialogued and returned to us their final versions. The African Storybook assistant publisher uploaded each language translations, noting issues such as:
We referred the above issues to the language translators to resolve. We also sent the links of the published stories to them for them to read and do a final check on their translations. Once they were happy, we approved the translations.
Lessons learned
These are some of the lessons that we learned regarding remote support for story translation:
General observations
Initially, we had planned on giving the translators PDFs in English and CiNyanja but after the trial, they raised the issue that the CiNyanja translations African Storybook had published were very different from that spoken in Malawi, so they proceeded to translate 19 remaining ones from English only. In consultation with the translators, for languages spoken in other countries, we decided to publish the translations as Ciyawo (Malawi), Ellomwe (Malawi) and Chitonga (Malawi), just in case, these versions would be different from those spoken in other Southern African countries.
The process helped us to know who to call on for future translation and quality assurance work. It was a good way of knowing who is proficient in the use of technology and could accomplish tasks digitally without having to rely on another person.
The pairing of teachers and university professors added value as it encouraged a discussion between the two, leading to consensus. The trial of the first story gave us an idea of how long it would take. It effectively enabled us to change strategy to save time and still have a very productive process.
After publishing and sending them the links to the published storybooks, each language pair was motivated enough to read them, notice errors and take the initiative to send corrections. This was very fulfilling as it demonstrated the pride they had in the work they did and wanted it to be as valuable as possible.
We did it!
We had 120 quality assured storybooks in Citumbuka, Ciyawo, Chinkhonde, Chichewa, Chitonga and Ellomwe translated from:
Also the 68 key words were translated into the six languages and the recording of each word was saved in a separate mp4 file with the language name and word number, for example, as Chichewa1. Each person in the language pair translated 34 of them and then quality assured their partner’s translation, using the same process as for the stories.