Haitian Creole in the digital age

By Marleen Julien Souverain

As Haiti confronts ongoing crises, Haitian Heritage Month emerges as a powerful reminder of the enduring elements of our culture that we continue to celebrate. Among these, Haitian Creole stands as a beacon of resilience and cultural identity. This month offers a unique opportunity to honor and promote our heritage, particularly through the advancement of our language. As we explore the digital advancements that have transformed the accessibility and usage of Haitian Creole, we see how technology not only preserves but also amplifies our cultural expression on a global scale.

The digital realm has become a key frontier in this cultural promotion. If it seems that you have recently encountered more well-crafted, grammatically correct Haitian Creole in online platforms, you are not mistaken. Although Haitian Creole was declared the official language of Haiti in 1987, standard French is still prevalent in formal discourse in Haiti, especially in financial and legal proceedings. All of this is changing with the advancement of digital media. With its inclusion in the language menu of Google Translate and a fully localized interface in Facebook, Haitian Creole has made significant strides in the digital realm over the past years. Amidst rising globalization and worldwide migration streams, access to languages of limited diffusion, i.e. those outside of the traditional set of frequently encountered languages, has become ever more important. Haitian Creole is spoken by 12 million people worldwide and is the third most common language in Florida. Even so, the recent linguistic advances didn’t just happen on their own. 

The traditional stereotype of a translator as a bookish person working with a paper dictionary no longer holds true. Modern translators make use of advanced, interconnected software to conduct their research online. Entire teams of trained linguists – based in the U.S. and Haiti – collaborate to prepare and edit translations from English into Haitian Creole. Although news reports about the breakthroughs of AI appear to suggest otherwise, machines alone are not capable of producing fully accurate translations. While major languages such as those spoken at the UN have extensive corpora based on dictionaries and centuries of published materials, Haitian Creole, which has been a predominantly spoken language in the past, cannot rely on comparable resources. Artificial intelligence (AI) engines must be fed relevant information before they can begin the work of learning from it, and in the case of our language, they can only draw on limited data. Before an online tool such as Google Translate can produce basic phrases in Creole, translators must therefore pour over long vocabulary lists to confirm equivalencies. As you will surely have noticed, such tools struggle to translate complex texts that include special professional terms or slang. 

The expansion of Haitian Creole in the digital age results from the confluence of multiple historical, legal, and economic factors. The devastating earthquake of 2010 in Haiti led to a spike in demand for language services, as international aid organizations scrambled to provide local assistance in Haiti and realized that materials offered exclusively in French did not always meet the needs of the local population. At the same time, the growing number of new immigrants to the United States who speak a primary language other than English has compelled government agencies at all levels to offer professionally translated versions of civic content. For example, the State of New York approved a sweeping language access law in 2022 that mandates translating the content of state publications into 12 different languages spoken in the state, as determined by census data. One of these languages is Haitian Creole. Haitians who settle in the U.S. are also a powerful economic force – as students, employees, and consumers. Consequently, businesses have shown an increasing interest in producing content such as employee manuals, lease agreements, or vocational instructions in Haitian Creole. This boom in demand for language services in turn has created new job opportunities for educated bilingual speakers who can help cross the linguistic divide as translators (who write texts) or interpreters (who offer spoken services, for example in courts or hospitals).

Finding online information in your own language is an empowering experience, but a language must be consistent to maximize its effectiveness. Without uniform spelling rules and established grammar, meanings vary too much to be useful. There have been extensive efforts to standardize the usage rules for Haitian Creole, led by the Haitian Creole Academy and other language advocates. The booming demand for translated content has not only driven this harmonization further but has also helped define new Haitian Creole words for modern concepts, for example the names of the omnipresent emojis in social media. In the course of this process, Haitian Creole has attained a different level of significance. While educated speakers tended to emphasize their knowledge of French in formal encounters in the past, modern Haitians perceive Haitian Creole as a powerful means to unite their community and to celebrate their culture. Although the translation industry helps to elevate and preserve our rich linguistic heritage, it is up to individual Haitians to contribute to this trend. 

Stay tuned for Part II of this piece, which will go into greater detail on such contributions.

Marleen Julien Souverain has worked as a language advocate, translator, and interpreter for more than 15 years. She is passionate about preserving the rich linguistic tradition of Haitian Creole and defending language access rights. Her woman-owned company, Creole Solutions, provides language and cultural consulting services for private and public sector clients. 

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