Welcome to Voyant Compass
Guiding the development of multilingual interfaces in underrepresented languages.
Most digital humanities tools speak English first. The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) has a Special Interest Group on Multilingual DH. Its members point out that almost all our tools and tutorials are built to work with English before any other language. A scholar who reads texts in Ewe, Quechua or Sámi still has to find their way through English menus.
Voyant Tools, created by Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, is one of the most widely used text-analysis environments in the field. Its interface already speaks sixteen languages besides English. The Voyant Consortium team, led by Professor Geoffrey Rockwell, now wants to bring in the languages that software usually leaves out. Voyant Compass is where that work happens.
Augustine Farinola designed the pipeline and built this app. Machine drafts come only from models that pass a quality test for your language, and people make every decision after that. Translators write, reviewers vote for the best option, and each language lead signs off. A lead's sign-off goes live on the experimental Voyant server, and a language moves to the main Voyant site once its main screen is approved. That main screen comes first. It holds 254 of the 956 labels in the interface, so a language can reach real users within a semester. Every choice is recorded with who made it and when.
Some options are human translations borrowed from other open projects, with thanks to the volunteer translators of Mozilla (Firefox and Common Voice), MediaWiki (translatewiki.net) and the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository, and to the Kilinux project at the University of Dar es Salaam for its Swahili computing glossary. Volunteers judge them like any other option.
You do not need to be a programmer. You need to know your language and care how it reads on a screen. Press Preview at any time to see your work in Voyant with a real text loaded.
The people
Our language leads are Yasmina Djemil (Arabic), Monika Singh (Bhojpuri), Patience Emefa Dzandza Ocloo (Ewe), Sunday Ibbi Patrick (Hausa), Charity Hanson (Ibibio), Abraham (Idoma), Victoria Ojodomo Adeyi (Igala), Ozioma Okey-Kalu (Igbo), Isabella Ndebele (isiZulu), Ernesta Kazakėnaitė (Lithuanian), Tichapiwa Zishiri (Meru and Shona), Jaskiran Gill (Punjabi), Lebona Mafisa (Sesotho), Bonaventure Munganga (Swahili) and Augustine A Farinola (Yoruba).
Our translators and reviewers are Abdussalam Olawale Amoo, Abel Eleojo Ochika, Abiodun Olayinka Ogunlade, Ajibola Kufoniyi, Akoje, Ojodumi Oliver, Alade Mayowa, Augustine Farinola, Blessing Ezinne Okah, Cecilia Eme, Ewajesu Okewumi, James Gibek Jude, Joseph Odo, Kgothatso Portia Makgotlho, Monday Ayegba, Mulikah Adeyemi Lawal, Sylvia Ezeaka, Uba Marycynthia, Udoumoh Onyinyechi Blessing and Yohanna Joseph Waliya.
Thank you all.
There are 680 languages open to volunteers. If yours is not among them, ask us to add it.