trip to Paraguay!

Paraguay, March 2013

Hey! I guess I mentioned briefly that I was in Paraguay this past week. But I didn't really talk about the trip much.

Over spring break, I went with my advisor Mike and collaborator Alberto on a trip to Paraguay! We're interested in Paraguay mostly because of their interesting language situation -- they're pretty much bilingual there, with Spanish and Guarani. It's one of the few places (maybe the only place?) in the Americas where it's pretty common for non-indigenous people to speak the indigenous language.

While we were there, we spoke with Guarani-language teachers, where they're training translators and linguists; we went to a few different schools, observed some classes, talked with language policy folks that Mike knows. Lots of people to meet, and lots to learn about how they're doing translation and language learning.

Also on Monday and Wednesday, we went out to the next little town over, Caacupé, where they've deployed One Laptop Per Child laptops for all the kids. We talked to the school administrators there, and also the OLPC folks. They've got this office full of little green laptops there, and kids come to get their laptops fixed up, when they need help. The school administrators told us we could just go visit some schools, so we did.

Our visits to the schools were probably the most striking parts of the trip. We went to these little school in Caacupé and strolled right in -- the teachers might have been expecting us -- hopefully the administrators told them we were coming! But we looked really out of place! Alberto's from Paraguay, if rather more cityfolk -- but Mike and I are so clearly foreign, rolling in with our beards and curly puffy hair. And we walked on in to the school, said hi, and got to talk with teachers and students at two different schools.

The kids in both places were really friendly -- they were excited to show us their laptops and how they used them. They use them a lot! Some of the kids already knew how to use Scratch (but I showed some other kids, who hadn't played with it yet). One of the things they really like to do is send messages to one another and have the computer say the message out loud! (OLPCs know how to do that, which is rad). But here's the problem -- the laptops can only pronounce Spanish! There's no text-to-speech voice for Guarani. Yet.

And the kids in Caacupé really do speak Guarani -- though they spoke Spanish to us. And there was one little boy who told us he'd moved there from Argentina, so he didn't speak Guarani. The kids were so chatty! I think they're used to foreigners coming to talk to them about the laptops.

It hit me, after the first visit to the schools, how much we were really making use of our foreign-white-scientist privilege here. We didn't have anything to do with the OLPC project (aside from a desire to collaborate with them), but here we were, wandering into schools without so much as a release form, talking to the kids. I'm trying to imagine Paraguayan scientists coming to the US to observe technology use in niños estadounidenses.

I'm not going to complain about that, though -- we're going to do something good and useful for Paraguay and one of the languages the kids speak! Just... wow.

We spent some time talking with the teachers (and drinking tereré, which pretty much everybody in Paraguay seems to drink all the time) about what they'd want in language tools -- one of the major problems is that it's hard to type the funky Guarani ãccẽnts on the OLPC keyboard.

I stayed with Alberto's family! They have a lovely house in Asunción, and they took really good care of me while I was there -- they made veggie food even!

When I got back, I gave a talk about what we're doing at ClingDing, the computational linguistics seminar: http://cl.indiana.edu/wiki/GuaraniComputerAssistedTranslation

It's really nice to be back. But now: we gotta build this stuff. My work, it's cut out for me. We're going to need about twelve more programmers. It'd be good if they were Paraguayan.