Linguistic considerations

Throughout the history of the four Lomé Conventions (1975 to the present) the signatories have agreed that the working languages of the Convention should be English and French, although the 86 countries which are signatories to Lomé IV themselves utilise a multiplicity of local and official languages.

Since CTA's establishment, the main output of its publishing activities has been mainly in English and French. Globally, there are far more publications on tropical agricultural development available in English than in French because the market for English-language publications is far larger. This has two important consequences. Firstly, technical information is more easily obtained in English, thus giving added significance to CTA's output in the French language; and secondly, the unit cost of publications in French can be up to 100% greater than the equivalent English-language publications because of differences in economies of scale in their production and marketing.

CTA's practice with regard to the production of specific publications in both English and French versions has been to respond to need (particularly relevance and the avoidance of duplication) rather than to produce versions in each language as a matter of routine. This will continue to be CTA's policy. Technical publications with a limited audience such as CTA seminar proceedings will, as before, generally be published in the language of delivery with, whenever practicable, abstracts in the alternate language.

Besides the English and French-speaking ACP countries, there are five Portuguese-speaking countries (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe) and two Spanish-speaking countries (Dominican Republic and Equatorial Guinea) in the ACP Group. The problems of providing information on demand to these countries were addressed by CTA in two major seminars held in the late eighties: "Portuguese Information Sources for Agricultural Development", 7-l I November l988, Lisbon, Portugal (summary report in English, French and Portuguese) and "Agricultural Information Sources in Hispanophone countries", 6-9 November 1989, Madrid, Spain.

The meeting to address the needs of the five PALOP (African countries with Portuguese as the official language) countries proposed, in particular, the publication of a Portuguese-language version of CTA's bulletin Spore. This version, Esporo, first appeared in 1993 and will continue to be published by CTA as its main contribution to providing information on demand to the PALOPS countries. A small number of copublications have been produced in Portuguese; consideration will continue to be given to such publications on a case-by-case basis.

The meeting on hispanophone information sources recommended that CTA should consider translating reference books on rural technologies written in Spanish into English and French. This will continue to be done to a very limited extent, mainly in the Caribbean, where there is a need to enhance communication with the countries of Latin America.

CTA does not have a mandate to publish in local ACP languages such as Kiswahili, Mandinka or Hausa. The number of such languages is large, and publications in these languages would be mainly of local importance: although some such languages are indeed used extensively throughout certain regions (e.g. Kiswahili in Eastern Africa). CTA's inability to produce its output in such languages limits its ability to reach farming communities; but it is generally not realistic for CTA to attempt to serve the needs of such vast and diverse partners directly. Nevertheless, CTA recognises that it is important that the information needs of such groups be met, and various proposals will continue to be examined. In particular, the report of the evaluation of CTA's Publications Distribution Service (1997) pointed to the possibility of making available local language editions produced by local publishers of practical and popular books such as the Agrodok series. CTA will, with its partners, examine the possibility of achieving this objective by co-publishing or by awarding publishing rights to ACP publishers.