[A12n-forum] Journal may publish in Hausa, Swahili, Bambara

["Don Osborn" <dzo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A new academic journal, Wagadu: A Journal for Transnational Women's and Gender Studies, is indicating openness to publish articles in several African languages among a number of international languages.

 

From the website http://web.cortland.edu/wagadu/ it says:
"Wagadu will make every effort to publish articles in the following languages: Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Russian, Hausa, KiSwahili, Bambara, Hindi, Tamil, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese."

 

I've written the editors to inquire about their intended approach to dealing with the different character sets & extended Latin characters.  I think it would be of interest for this list.

 

Publication - even print publication - is of course computerized since a long time (I remember working with an early computerized typesetter for a high school newspaper 30 years ago), and how it deals with African languages with diverse character requirements is an ongoing and very current issue.  It is complicated now, I would think by the fact that the publishing software does not yet have compatability with the Unicode standard - so far as I know - so different sets of fonts with different encodings may have to be negotiated in producing a single multilingual document.

 

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net