Lost in translation? There’s an app for that

MOIRA SCHNEIDER

In the small town that he was sent to, his hosts didn’t speak English, and he didn’t speak a word of Spanish. For the first four months, he battled to get a grasp of the language, something he found “incredibly stressful”. Eight months in, he was fluent.

“It changed my perspective on life,” he says. “I could communicate, and I made longstanding friends.”

Stein was participating as a change-maker on Mandela Day last Sunday, hosted by Mensch at the Gardens Community Centre in Cape Town.

Mensch is a platform that supports and facilitates change makers and change-making activities to bring about social transformation. Its Mandela Day and Mitzvah Day projects have become popular as community volunteering events.

On Stein’s return to South Africa from his year in Argentina, he realised there were people around him who had come to the cities seeking employment and education, who hadn’t had much exposure to English growing up. He estimates that up to 50% of South Africans deal with this issue on a daily basis.

“How do they get by? With great difficulty. Going home isn’t an option. Their ability to learn is hindered because of a lack of language.

“English is seen as the language that will get you jobs. Also, for example, if you go to the doctor, he asks you questions that you don’t understand, and you try to explain your symptoms without the language”, not to mention the repercussions of possibly incorrect diagnoses and not understanding the treatment prescribed.

Stein is managing director of Aweza, an internationally award-winning tech-based initiative that strives to empower South Africans to overcome language barriers across all sectors of society. He is the winner of the International Netexplo Innovation Award (2016).

As a mobile software developer and product manager, he has always been driven by the idea of using tech for civic good.

His app, AwezaMed, facilitates communication between medical practitioners and those whose first language isn’t English. It has been piloted in the area of reproductive health, in partnership with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

During the course of its development, the 30-year-old Stein spent months sitting in on medical consultations (with permission) and speaking to doctors and nurses. The app has been launched over ten pilot sites in rural and urban public clinics and hospitals across South Africa.

The trial has made the medical text-to-speech app available to 50 doctors and nurses for the past six months.

Stein spent years building the app, which consists of thousands of blocks of code. The project combines three human language technologies: automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech, to establish a speech-to-speech translation system, catering for speech input in one language, and speech output in another.

The app comprises 1 800 medical phrases, questions, explanations, instructions, reassurances, and patient responses in Afrikaans, isiXhosa, and isiZulu, the result of hundreds of hours spent with doctors and nurses compiling the list.

The list was then translated into three national languages and synthesised into audio, using the CSIR’s text-to-speech engine.

Stein wants to add Portuguese, French, Arabic, and Swahili to the app. His dream is to see AwezaMed make its mark across the African continent, and beyond.

It assists doctors to diagnose patients accurately, as opposed to, for example, calling in the male security guard who isn’t a qualified translator to translate what are obviously sensitive issues in the field of reproductive health.

“I see myself as a language activist,” he says. “I embrace language as a tool to foster understanding and make the world a better place. It’s the lens through which we see the world and it can, in extreme cases, mean the difference between life and death.”

Stein notes that many English first-language speakers in this country are monolingual as they’ve never had to learn a language to survive.

“You don’t need to become fluent to show respect to your fellow Xhosa-speaking South Africans,” he says. “You could learn five or six phrases. You don’t need to put in a lot of effort. You’ll be amazed at the difference it can make.”

“If you speak to a man in his mother tongue, you speak to his heart,” he says, paraphrasing Mandela.