The more observant readers of the Limpopo Mirror, and especially our online readers, will have noticed a new addition to the website: We are also offering a selection of articles in Tshivenda. Every week, a selection of articles is translated and made available to our readers.
The responsibility to translate the articles rests on the shoulders of our intern, Khathutshelo Prudence Raliphaswa. She started working on 1 March this year and will translate up to a dozen articles every week.
Khathu has an aptitude for languages, with Tshivenda being one of her strongest subjects in school. She has already settled in comfortably with the news team and says she looks forward to gaining first-hand experience through her job as translator and growing in the media industry.
Khathu (25) was born and raised in Elim. She started her schooling at Mulweli Primary. Here her love of reading and writing short stories and poetry gradually began to develop into what was later to become a deep-rooted passion for her. She matriculated from Ozias Davhana Secondary School in 2016, and in 2018 she enrolled at the Boston College in Polokwane, where she did a short course in media consultancy for a year. Between 2020 and 2022, she studied journalism at the Rosebank College in Pretoria.
The editor of the Limpopo Mirror, Mr Anton van Zyl, says that this initiative to translate news articles from English into the Vhembe region's indigenous languages is something he had been wanting to bring in as an added service to the readers for many years. He says the idea is to later also do translations into Xitsonga, for the Tsonga-speaking communities who want to stay informed about news happenings in the area.
"This is not a commercial venture and is purely aimed at providing a service to our Tshivenda-speaking readers. Languages are such important parts of our local communities, and we should all do our bit not only to protect them, but also to help the languages grow," says Van Zyl. He feels that even though the local vernaculars are widely spoken, not enough such news is available in written format as yet.