Leveraging Technology and Translation in Archiving and Propagating The history of Yoruba Language in Nigeria

Abstract

The Yoruba language is one of the major African languages and an important carrier of the history, identity, traditions, philosophy, oral literature, and cultural values of the Yoruba people. However, much of Yoruba cultural and linguistic knowledge has historically been transmitted orally, while a significant proportion of older written, audio, and audiovisual materials remain scattered across libraries, private collections, religious institutions, museums, and family archives. The rapid development of digital technology provides opportunities to preserve, organize, access, and disseminate these materials for present and future generations. This study examines the role of technology and translation in archiving and propagating the history of the Yoruba language. It focuses on digital repositories, digitization, electronic dictionaries, speech technology, machine translation, optical character recognition, online learning platforms, and social media as tools for preserving and promoting Yoruba. Recent research demonstrates growing resources for Yoruba natural language processing, including parallel translation corpora, speech datasets, and dialectal resources. However, significant challenges remain, particularly inadequate digitization of historical materials, limited high-quality datasets, orthographic and diacritic issues, dialectal variation, copyright concerns, and weaknesses in culturally sensitive machine translation. The study argues that technological preservation should not merely store Yoruba materials but should make them searchable, translatable, educationally useful, and accessible to Yoruba-speaking communities. It recommends collaboration among linguists, historians, translators, technologists, libraries, government institutions, cultural organizations, and native speakers to establish sustainable digital Yoruba archives.