University of South Africa: Scholars get recognised for promoting multilingualism

Established in 2002, the PanSALB Multilingualism Awards promote the use of mother tongue and multilingualism, especially for individuals or organisations who have excelled in the promotion and preservation of all official languages, which includes Khoi, Nama, San and South African Sign languages.

Mabule obtained the first place award in the Translation and Interpretation category, whilst Letsoalo received the third place award in the Mzansi Taal community engagement project for its online colloquial language dictionary.

Mabule says that her goal is to encourage others and to continue promoting South African languages through translation and interpreting at all levels of learning.

For Letsoalo, indigenous languages play a vital role in the languages spoken by the youth. “Therefore,” he continues, “we will be working on the development of online resources for indigenous languages. Languages should be used to unite the nation. The goal is to develop online language resources for languages spoken by young people.”