A key moment arrives in most translation projects: the work shifts from technicians to making high-stakes choices. As a translator, the real challenge is bridging the untranslatable gap between languages. At this juncture, the decisive factor is not language itself, but the thought process guiding every choice. For a long time, I would make that […]
This article continues The Translator Who Takes Everything. We examine how freelance translators can avoid the generalist trap. If you missed the previous article, start there. The last piece ended with a question: What do I want to go big on? Most translators never sit with this simple question long enough to answer it. Discomfort […]
There is a Hausa word, kawalwalniya, that describes a mirage. From a distance, it looks like water, like relief, like something worth walking toward. Only when you get close do you realize there was never anything there. Generalism in translation is a mirage. To outsiders, translators who accept every job seem productive and versatile. They […]
Before the Latin alphabet arrived in Northern Nigeria, the region relied entirely on Ajami. This Arabic-derived script, specifically adapted to carry Hausa sounds, was used to record palace records, trade contracts, poetry, treaties, and Islamic scholarship. By the 17th century, the script anchored full published books. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it operated as […]
In Nigeria’s digital economy, friction has evolved beyond slow servers. Today, a mere gap in meaning causes a one-second hesitation; a cognitive delay that instantly triggers a 7% drop in conversions. With onboarding drop-off rates for financial apps now hemorrhaging between 63% and 85% of users, the primary culprit is what researchers call the “Patience […]
To sound authoritative in Hausa, financial commands require the right rhythm. Without it, they can easily come across as aggressive. Because Hausa is a tonal language, a shift in pitch alters meaning just as drastically as spelling does in English. That tonal pattern can instantly turn a polite request into a blunt order, a critical […]
The IrokoBench results, published at NAACL 2025 and now widely used to measure African language performance, reveal a gap that the industry has not addressed quickly enough. GPT-4o scores 72.5% on English tasks but drops to 48.1% on African languages. LLaMA 3 (70B) does even worse, averaging just 25.5%, which is 45 points lower than […]
Most digital platforms don’t mishandle the Hausa language out of malice. Instead, it happens because responsibility is quietly passed along. We often treat language like code, adding it at the end and expecting it to fit into templates that were never meant to carry culture. When we rely only on dictionaries, a rich worldview gets […]
With the cost of acquiring a new user at about $1,450, which is a common fintech benchmark, every mistranslated screen quietly eats into your budget. When someone leaves because of a poor interface, it is not just a UX issue; we can consider it a financial one as well. If you are targeting the 150 […]
