Digraphie des langues ouest africaines : Latin2Ajami : un algorithme de translitteration automatique

The national languages of Senegal, like those of West Africa country in general, are written with two alphabets : the Latin alphabet that draws its strength from official decreesm and the completed Arabic script (Ajami), widespread and well integrated, that has little institutional support. This digraph created two worlds ignoring each other. Indeed, Ajami writing is generally used daily by populations from Koranic schools, while writing with the Latin alphabet is used by people from the public school. To solve this problem, it is useful to establish transliteration tools between these two scriptures. Preliminary work (Nguer, Bao-Diop, Fall, khoule, 2015) was performed to locate the problems, challenges and prospects. This present work, making it subsequently fell into this. Its objective is the study and creation of a transliteration algorithm from latin towards Ajami.

Digraph of Senegal s local languages: issues, challenges and prospects of their transliteration

The local languages in Senegal, like those of West African countries in general, are written based on two alphabets: supplemented Arabic alphabet (called Ajami) and Latin alphabet. Each writing has its own applications. Ajami writing is generally used by people educated in Koranic schools for communication, business, literature (religious texts, poetry, etc.), traditional religious medicine, etc. Writing with Latin characters is used for localization of ICT (Web, dictionaries, Windows and Google tools translated in Wolof, etc.), the translation of legal texts (commercial code and constitution translated in Wolof) and religious ones (Quran and Bible in Wolof), book edition, etc. To facilitate both populations general access to knowledge, it is useful to set up transliteration tools between these two scriptures. This work falls within the framework of the implementation of project for a collaborative online dictionary Wolof (Nguer E. M., Khoule M, Thiam M. N., Mbaye B. T., Thiare O., Cisse M. T., Mangeot M. 2014), which will involve people using Ajami writing. Our goal will consist, on the one hand in raising the issues related to the transliteration and the challenges that this will raise, and on the other one, presenting the perspectives.