Participatory detection of language barriers towards multilingual sustainability(ies) in Africa
Date
2022-07-04
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
MDPI
Abstract
After decades of political, economic, and scientific efforts, humanity has not gotten any
closer to global sustainability. With less than a decade to reach the UN Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) deadline of the 2030 Agenda, we show that global development agendas may be
getting lost in translation, from their initial formulation to their final implementation. Sustainability
science does not “speak” most of the 2000 languages from Africa, where the lack of indigenous
terminology hinders global efforts such as the COVID-19 pandemic fight. Sociolinguistics, social
psychology, cognitive ergonomics, geography, environmental sciences, and artificial intelligence
(AI) are all relevant disciplinary fields to uncover the “foreign language effect” that hinders the
implementation of the SDGs in Africa. We make the case for detecting and addressing language
barriers towards multilingual sustainability in Africa by (1) exploring the ”foreign language effect”
among African decision-makers and recognising their alternative social representations about sustainability; and (2) detecting Western language stereotypes about sustainability. We propose rethinking
SDG-related scientific notions through participatory natural language processing (NLP) and the
study of African social representations of sustainability, thus enabling a more inclusive and efficient
approach to “sustainability(ies)”.
Description
CITATION: Litre, G. et al. 2022. Participatory detection of language barriers towards multilingual sustainability(ies) in Africa. Sustainability, 14(13):8133, doi:10.3390/su14138133.
The original publication is available at https://www.mdpi.com
The original publication is available at https://www.mdpi.com
Keywords
Multilingualism, Monolingualism, Sustainable development -- Africa, Economic development -- Africa, United Nations. General Assembly. Transforming our World : the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Language and languages -- Study and teaching -- Africa, Sustainable development goals -- Africa, Ecology in literature -- Study and teaching -- Africa, Covid-19 (Disease), Social psychology and literature
Citation
Litre, G. et al. 2022. Participatory detection of language barriers towards multilingual sustainability(ies) in Africa. Sustainability, 14(13):8133, doi:10.3390/su14138133.