ICTworks

There are more than 7,000 human languages, yet only those few used by the world’s economically and politically powerful nations have a strong online presence in digital platforms.

For example, a language like Swahili, spoken by 100 million people, is marginalised globally, and Nande, a language spoken by some 10 million people, is marginalised in eastern DRC, where official communication is largely in French and Congolese Swahili.

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As digital services expand, minority language speakers are becoming more excluded, with the most noticeable gaps in African languages and even major languages such as Bengali/Bangla and Hindi.

The risk of digital language exclusion is intersectional. Worldwide, women and girls, older adults, people with disabilities and minority ethnic groups have less literacy, numeracy, digital and second-language skills, and therefore, lower levels of access to, and use of, digital technologies.

6 Barriers for Marginalized Language Speakers

GSMA’s recent report “Language and Digital Humanitarian Action” highlights six challenges that hinder aid because the constituent’s language is not compatible with current digital support services:

1. Speakers of marginalized languages miss out on vital information, warnings, updates and services that are only provided in dominant languages.
2. Marginalized language speakers face increased vulnerability to fraud, abuse and exploitation when relying on others to translate or access services for them.
3. Informed consent is compromised when people must agree to data collection and service terms in a language they don’t fully understand.
4. Meaningful two-way communication and accountability to affected people is limited when they cannot give feedback or express needs in their preferred language.
5. Existing inequalities are exacerbated as those facing multiple forms of disadvantage (women, elderly, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities) are disproportionately impacted by language barriers layered on top of other access challenges.
6. The humanitarian principles of impartiality and inclusivity are undermined when whole language communities are inadvertently excluded from digital aid provision.

How to Include Marginalized Language Speakers

We need to develop fast and affordable machine translation and speech recognition for all languages, and bring these services to people in ways they can access. Digital inclusion means more than just expanding Internet access or smartphone adoption. We must reach people where they are, in the languages they speak.

The first step is to overcome data scarcity in marginalized languages. XRI Global is actively working with humanitarian and development organizations to build the translation layers that they need for their digital support services in any language.

For example, in just 4 weeks, we collected domain-specific parallel data and built a machine translation model for a low-resource language in Sumatra Indonesia that resulted in Google Translate level quality. Prior to our data collection, there was no existing data for this language.

The next step is to bring digital services to these communities. We like Viamo’s new “Ask Viamo Anything” feature on their platform. People with basic, non-internet phones called a toll-free number and asked any question on their minds. In a matter of seconds, a Generative AI tool provides them with an answer.

Over 5,000 users in Zambia have posed 46,000 questions and received answers in the “Ask Viamo Anything” pilot, enhancing their ability to make informed decisions. Viamo can also suggest follow-up questions so that the interactions flow like a real conversation.

Now imagine pairing a service like that with our language capacity. It would be a game-changing innovation for humanitarian programs for digitally isolated populations. We could overcome many barriers that marginalized language speakers face today, and create a better world for us all tomorrow.

By Daniel Wilson, Founder and CEO of XRI Global