In contrast to the use of very specific local varieties, there is also the case where clients want a single document that provides a “universal” rendering of several different local dialects of a given language. For major languages that have undergone language standardization for several centuries, there is sometimes the possibility to provide such a universally understood version of the language.

The present article aims at describing how the idea of a universal Creole (or a pan Creole) is not possible, and the reasons why this is so. There are a number of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that have led to the need to localize for each Creole language, despite the fact that a level of up to 90 percent of mutual intelligibility has been found between the various Creoles in the Caribbean islands. What are the factors that push for localization and discourage universalization?

• assumption that Creole is a single language
• co-existing language contexts
• lack of standardization

The assumption

There is an assumption in many regions that Creole is a single language, usually influenced by immigration factors. For many Americans across the USA, Creole represents the language spoken in Louisiana. To those living in Florida or Boston, it is more closely associated with the language of Haitians. For many people in New York, Creole is the language of Jamaicans. For people in France, it is the language of those who come from Martinique, Guadeloupe or Reunion. In reality, there are over 50 different Creole languages spoken in various territories throughout the world. Unknown to many people, Creoles do not all share the same lexical base. There are French-based Creoles whose vocabulary base is mainly derived from French, English-based Creoles whose vocabulary base is mainly derived from English, Spanish-based and Portuguese-based Creoles, a German-based Creole, and even Creoles (e.g., Swahili, Lingala, etc.) in Africa based on vocabulary derived from various African languages.

When a translation or localization job is requested to be in “Creole”, the first question that should immediately be raised is: “Which Creole?” In 1999, there was the case of a Creole language translation job that was not clarified and communicated effectively throughout the supply chain of the translation vendors. The resulting translated text was referred to as a “Creole hoax”. A thread of discussion messages appeared on the LinguistList (http://www.linguistlist.org) and on the CreoList (http://www.ling.su.se/Creole), providing a prime example of what can happen when universalization is assumed and applied to Creole languages instead of determining and using localization procedures:

http://linguistlist.org/issues/10/10-1812.html#1

http://linguistlist.org/issues/10/10-1818.html#1

http://linguistlist.org/issues/10/10-1825.html#1

http://linguistlist.org/issues/10/10-1996.html#1

http://linguistlist.org/issues/11/11-27.html#1

http://linguistlist.org/issues/11/11-67.html#1

The main error of this so-called hoax was simply that the client and vendors in the overall chain did not adhere to specifying and confirming “which Creole” at every stage of the communication channel. The intended target language was Haitian Creole (a French-based Creole) whereas the resulting translated document was produced in Jamaican Creole (an English-based Creole). They overlooked the fact that the name “Creole” covers a group of languages consisting of local varieties with different lexical bases. It is essential that translation and localization vendors assimilate and implement this point in order to avoid the same error that occurred as mentioned in the thread of messages above. Yet, such an issue is not simply pertinent only for Creole languages. It is also very relevant for many less-prevalent languages spoken in the world.

We are reminded that there are over 40 different non mutually intelligible local varieties of Quechua spoken in South America (Constable, 2001, p. 68). Similar to the case for Creole, it would be essential to specify which Quechua variety is the intended target language for a localization job. Swahili is another example of a language that is highly dialectalized throughout many countries in east and central Africa and whose spoken form has affected the written form to a certain extent.

These examples are cases in point demonstrating that many languages on the different continents are not only diverse in their spoken form, but also in their written form. A crucial element to consider is that the majority of modern educational and literacy programs for traditionally non-written languages now focus on developing and implementing phonemic alphabets. In theory, a phonemic alphabet should help provide a standardized form for different pronunciations of individual sounds. When taking into consideration that Creole languages spoken on different islands have historically been colonized and governed by different countries, this is a factor which creates another dynamic that pushes for localization rather than universalization. This issue is developed in the next subsection.

Co-existing languages

One of the particularities of Creole languages is that they almost always co-exist with another national and/or official language that is the language used in educational environments. In other words, reading and writing skills within the given Creole-speaking country will often be acquired first through the co-existing language and its specific writing conventions. Yet, to complicate matters even more, a French-based Creole is not exclusively and necessarily spoken in a French-speaking territory nor in a co-existence environment with French. There are in fact several cases where a French-based Creole co-exists with English and not with French. For example, four French-Creole speaking neighboring islands in the Caribbean are Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique and St. Lucia in order from north to south. Each of the islands is roughly 500–1000 square kilometers in size, and the distance between each of the four vertically aligned islands in the archipelago is approximately 50 to 60 kilometers. The Creole languages on these neighboring islands all formed in a similar manner back in the 17th–18th centuries. The histories of the islands are however different in that following a dozen or so transfers of possession between France and England during that period, the islands Dominica and St. Lucia were both finally ceded to England in the early 19th century. These two islands eventually gained their independence along with many other islands and countries during the late 1960s and are now currently part of the British Commonwealth. In contrast, the islands Guadeloupe and Martinique also went through possession transfers but finally remained French and have been two of the four official Overseas Departments of the Republic of France since the 1940s.

Studies have been conducted which show the linguistic influence that the official languages (French or English) have had on the French-based Creoles in the Caribbean (Allen, 1994; Ransau, 1994), but the fact that English words enter and assimilate into the French Creoles of St. Lucia and Dominica (or even Trinidad) is not necessarily a factor that impedes spoken communication for Creole speakers between the islands, nor completely forces localization of one language with respect to the neighboring Creole. Education is a more motivating force that subtly continues to affect these languages. In Guadeloupe and Martinique, the children are educated according to the French education system and in the French language, along with all of the accent marks (diacritics) that are relative to the French language. The promoters of Creole literacy and education in both Guadeloupe and Martinique have proposed orthographic systems that adopt a number of accent marks which allow Creole speakers to not only read and write in their native Creole tongue, but which also allow for a transition into reading and writing in French—the official language. Both the acute (upward) and grave (downward) accents (e.g., é and è) are used in the French-Creole spelling systems used in these islands.

On the other hand, the neighboring islands of Dominica and St. Lucia received English as their official language at the beginning of the 19th century. Since English uses no accent marks (except for some words of foreign origin), the French Creole speakers of these islands have been educated in English in an environment without accent marks in the written language. Yet, when these speakers learn to write in their native French-based Creole, it is necessary for them to use some distinctive symbols (such as accent marks) to differentiate between the contrasted sounds which can be represented by the same letter/character.

Another case is that of Haiti in which Haitian Creole is the native language of the entire population, and is the only language used by over 90% of Haitians. French has been the official language in that country for at least two centuries and is the language of education in the majority of institutions for those Haitians who can attend school. The numerous efforts exerted by different groups to create a spelling system for Haitian Creole—starting in the 1940s—led to the creation of several different orthographies over the decades and finally resulted in an accepted official written form for this Creole in 1979. The interesting point about this spelling system is that it uses a minimal amount of accent marks (only the grave accent) to distinguish between sounds. This optimal use of a minimal number of diacritics in Haitian Creole allows for differentiation without leading to diacritic overkill.

Standardization

As can be seen in the cases above, three different approaches were taken with regard to the use of accent marks. An attempt was then made during the early 1980s to develop an Antillean Kwéyòl written orthography that could represent the written language of the French Creoles spoken in the Lesser Antilles Caribbean islands. The two annual workshops held in 1981 and 1982 were sponsored by the Folk Research Centre, the Caribbean Research Centre and the National Research Development Foundation in St. Lucia. The issues mentioned further above were those which were brought up by the linguists and education and literacy specialists who attended the two annual workshops. Each island has educational priorities and linguistic contexts which affect how specialists choose to develop an orthography for the language and teach it to the Creole speakers in literacy classes.

Immediately following these workshops in St. Lucia, a newly founded BALATA newspaper was funded by UNESCO up through the end of that decade (1983–1990). Fifteen issues (containing on average 15 pages each) of this newspaper appeared and contained articles written in the various Creoles by contributors from each of the islands. A significant point to note is that all contributors to the BALATA newspaper used their own local orthography. Although readers from one island could more or less read the articles written by contributors from other islands, all readers dealt with the lack of use or the maximum use of accent marks. In other words, there was not an established minimal set of characteristics for a pan-Creole orthography for the Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean. Since islands higher up in the archipelago (e.g., Haiti) have even more distinctive grammatical and lexical forms compared with those islands of the Lesser Antilles, it appears improbable to try to derive and/or impose a universal written pan-Creole for the entire region of French Creoles in the Lesser Antilles area, despite the significantly high level of mutual intelligibility between these language varieties. In the localization sector, we would say that documents written in any of the various Creoles of this region would have to be localized according to the local written spelling system.

Provided below are examples of words written in different French Creole varieties. Those for St. Lucian French Creole are taken from the Dictionary of St. Lucian Creole (Mondesir& Carrington, 1992). Those for Dominican French Creole are taken from Dominica’s English–Creole Dictionary (Fontaine& Roberts, 1991). Those for Martinican Creole are from the Dictionnaire Elémentaire Français–Créole (Pinalie, 1992). Those for Haitian Creole are taken from the Learner’s Dictionary of Haitian Creole (Valdman et al, 1996).

It is important to note that the lexical diversity seen in these examples is due not only to differing orthographies depending on the sociolinguistic context of each island, but also with respect to pronunciation differences between the island varieties of French Creole. Given this range of linguistic, and especially sociolinguistic differences, establishing a single pan-Carribbean orthography for the French-based Creoles would be a difficult task.

Example	St. Lucian	Dominican	Martinican	Haitian
‘now’	atchwelman	atjwèlman	atjòlman	koulye
‘American’	méwitchen	mewitjen	méritjen	meriken
‘enemy’	lelmi	lèlmi	lennmi	lennmi

Another point on standardization has been very adequately discussed elsewhere (Mason, 2001; Mason 2000; Mason, 1999), yet is simply mentioned here. In many of these islands, there are often multiple competing orthographies that are proposed, promoted, and used by different groups. Although there are usually underlying political and educational reasons for adhering to one orthography over another, one of the primary obstacles to providing for standardized forms within any of the Creole languages is the lack of publicly available computer-based tools and applications to accomplish the task and reinforce the process and decisions. The company Mason Integrated Technologies (MIT2) is a language technology development and service provider that is focusing on the niche market of Creole and other minority languages with a set of tools and services for promoting standardization and localization efforts in these languages.

Examples of reading difficulty

Development efforts for creating speech-enabled systems (Eskenazi et al, 1998; Lenzo et al, 1998) included some experimental sessions which showed that Martinican, Guadeloupean and Reunionnais French-Creole speakers had a difficult time reading and recording out loud a variety of texts written in Haitian Creole. It took several times longer to conduct such recording sessions than with native Haitian speakers. These recording sessions are indicative of the importance of localization needs per Creole language.

Conclusion

Is localization important for dialect varieties of languages and language groups? Our experience over the past few decades with various French-based Creole languages has indicated that a pan or universal approach to writing in French Creole is not adequate for translation and localization efforts. The resulting texts will be considered as inherently foreign to native speakers of Creole languages from one island to the next. The foreignness has also shown to slow down comprehension in specific reading tasks. A number of sociolinguistic variables are factors that naturally lead to a need for localizing per Creole language, lest the resulting text be taken as a hoax in extreme cases. Creoles are one example of the necessity for localization, and it is highly probable that such needs can be found in a significant number of less-prevalent languages throughout the world.

References

Allen, Jeffrey. 1994. Sainte-Lucie: relexification, décréolisation, recréolisation ou adlexification? Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies doctoral thesis, Université Lyon 2, France.

BALATA, Castries, St. Lucia: Folk Research Centre, (1983-1990).

Constable, Peter. 2001. Working with Language Identifiers. In MuliLingual Computing & Technology magazine, #40, Vol. 12, Issue 4, pp. 63-69.

Eskenazi, Maxine, Christopher Hogan, Jeffrey Allen & Robert Frederking. 1998. Issues in database design: recording and processing speech from new populations. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (lrec 98), Vol. 2, pp. 1289–93. (available at: http://www.ling.su.se/Creole/Papers_On-Line.html#DB_Design)

Fontaine, Marcel (head compiler) & Peter Roberts (Ed). 1991. Dominica’s Kwéyòl–Annglé / English–Creole Dictionary. Dominica and Barbados: Konmité Pou Etid Kwéyòl & University of the West Indies-Cave Hill.

Lenzo, Kevin, Christopher Hogan & Jeffrey Allen. 1998. Rapid-Deployment Text-to-Speech in the DIPLOMAT System. Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP98). 30 Novembe–4 December 1998, Sydney, Australia.

Mason, Marilyn. 2001. Localization meets less-prevalent languages. To appear in MultiLingual Computing and Technology magazine, # 41, Vol. 12, Issue 5 (summer 2001).

———. 2000. Authoring and Documentation Workflow Tools for Haitian Creole—a Minority Language. In Technical Communicators’ (TC) Forum Magazine, volume 1-2000 (January-March 2000), pp. 8-9. (available online at: http://www.tc-forum.org/topictr/tr17auth.htm)

———. 1999. Orthographic Conversion and Lexical Standardization for Vernacular Languages. In ELRA Newsletter, Volume 4, Number 4, October-December 1999. pp. 5–7. Paris: European Language Resources Association.

Mondesir, Jones (compiler) & Lawrence Carrington (ed). 1992. Dictionary of St. Lucian Creole. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Pinalie, Pierre. 1992. Dictionnaire Elémentaire Français-Créole. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Ransau, Jacques. 1994. Etude des emprunts anglais dans le créole à base lexicale française de Trinidad, Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies doctoral thesis, G.E.R.E.C., Université des Antilles-Guyane, Martinique.

Valdman, Albert (in collaboration with Charles Pooser and Rozevel Jean-Baptiste), 1996. A Learner’s Dictionary of Haitian Creole. Bloomington: Indiana University Creole Institute.

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