Multilingual parallel corpus: An institutional resource for terminology development at the University of South Africa (Unisa)

Abstract

The indigenous African languages of South Africa are not fully developed to provide for specialised terminology and were considered unsuitable for use as languages of tuition and research. This was used as a scapegoat for not utilising these languages in the South African education system. Since 1994, however, terminology development has been one of the key priorities of democratic South Africa. The institutions of Higher Learning have been mandated to develop and intellectualise the indigenous languages for teaching, learning and research. In line with this, this article aims to address the problem of unavailability of scientific or technical terms by illustrating how a multilingual corpus ––from which multilingual glossaries as resources for tuition and research–– can be compiled. Adopting a qualitative descriptive approach, suitable source texts in English and their translations in various African indigenous languages, namely, IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, IsiNdebele, SiSwati, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga were selected from the University study material for inclusion in the multilingual parallel corpus. ParaConc, a software that is suitable to query parallel texts, was used to align and extract terms from the corpus. The study demonstrates how parallel texts can be useful in developing scientific and technical terms. The University of South Africa can become the centre of corpus compilation for the intellectualisation of the official indigenous South African languages, since it is the only university in the country that caters for all these languages.