Communications Manager is a new role for me. I that in haven’t done the past, I find it fascinating, very interesting. Lots to learn, and very I’m happy with what I do. M And a great organization. We know we have lots of listeners GALA’s who have found us through them, so that’s wonderful. You mentioned being on the client side and African languages. Is that when you were first exposed to working with African languages, or did you have an interest before that? MN No, my interest goes way back. I have a in African master’s degree Languages from the University of Cologne, decades ago. Done research in Africa, done some business in Africa, so been an there’s ongoing interest in the continent. R But African languages seems like an awfully big amount of languages. MN It is a big amount of languages, yes. R So do you specialize in all the African languages or do you focus on certain parts? MN Depending on how you count them, between 1,000 and 2,000 there’s languages spoken in Africa, and the languages that I focused on for my academic interest were languages in East Africa. So the region of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania was the area that I was interested in, but professionally worked with a wider variety of languages in I’ve Southern Africa as well as in Western Africa. So the largest languages on the continent are the ones that have gotten localized into, and so those are the ones that worked with. I’ve R So these would be how many? MN At Microsoft we localized into 12 African languages. There are three that doing in Nigeria, Hausa... or we were doing in Nigeria. we’re Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, Wolof in Senegal, in Ethiopia, Amharic and Tigrinya; Swahili for all of East Africa, and then in South Africa, we do a
Communications Manager is a new role for me. I haven’t done that in the past, I find it fascinating, very interesting. Lots to learn, and I’m very happy with what I do. M And GALA’s a great organization. We know we have lots of listeners who have found us through them, so that’s wonderful. You mentioned being on the client side and African languages. Is that when you were first exposed to working with African languages, or did you have an interest before that? MN No, my interest goes way back. I have a master’s degree in African Languages from the University of Cologne, decades ago. Done research in Africa, done some business in Africa, so there’s been an ongoing interest in the continent. R But African languages seems like an awfully big amount of languages. MN It is a big amount of languages, yes. R So do you specialize in all the African languages or do you focus on certain parts? MN Depending on how you count them, there’s between 1,000 and 2,000 languages spoken in Africa, and the languages that I focused on for my academic interest were languages in East Africa. So the region of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania was the area that I was interested in, but professionally I’ve worked with a wider variety of languages in Southern Africa as well as in Western Africa. So the largest languages on the continent are the ones that have gotten localized into, and so those are the ones that I’ve worked with. R So these would be how many? MN At Microsoft we localized into 12 African languages. There are three that we’re doing in Nigeria, Hausa... or we were doing in Nigeria. Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, Wolof in Senegal, in Ethiopia, Amharic and Tigrinya; Swahili for all of East Africa, and then in South Africa, we do a
Globally-Speaking-Podcast-044_Transcript.docx