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Xitsonga, Xichangana, and a border that changes the spelling

Start with the names, because they cause more confusion than anything else in this pair. The language is Xitsonga, the people are Vatsonga, an individual is a Mutsonga, and the English name Tsonga is the stem with all of those prefixes stripped off. That is not an accident of translation: the prefix system is how the language works, so the same root appears with xi for the language, va for a group of people, mu for one person and vu for the abstract idea. Anyone searching a catalogue for material in this language has to try more than one of these, because different institutions have indexed it differently over the years.

Roughly two and a quarter million people in South Africa give Xitsonga as their first language, mainly in Limpopo and Mpumalanga, and it is one of the country's official languages. The same language continues across the border into southern Mozambique, especially Gaza province and the area around Maputo, where it is generally called Xichangana or Changana, and it is spoken in parts of Zimbabwe and Eswatini as well. Speakers move between the varieties without much difficulty. The writing does not travel quite as smoothly, because South African spelling conventions grew up under English speaking missionary and educational influence while Mozambican ones developed in a Portuguese speaking environment. A text prepared in Giyani and a text prepared in Maputo look different on the page even when they say the same thing.

For a translation that means the destination has to be settled first. Material for the South African education department, for a Limpopo municipality or for a court in the province follows the South African standard. Material for a Mozambican audience follows theirs, and using the wrong one signals immediately that the document was made somewhere else, which matters when the whole point of translating was to reach people in their own language.

Who commissions Xitsonga translation

Almost all of it comes from institutions with an obligation to reach people rather than from private transactions, plus a steady flow of cross border labour paperwork:

• Provincial notices, municipal communication and public participation material from Limpopo and Mpumalanga, issued alongside the English version
• School textbooks, workbooks, examination papers and school reports, Xitsonga being a taught subject and a language of early instruction
• Clinic and hospital information, treatment guidance, consent explanations and public health campaign material
• Mine safety briefings, employment documents and union communication for the platinum and chrome operations that employ workers from the province
• Documents connected to Mozambican migrant workers and cross border families, where the same language spans two countries and two administrative systems
• Traditional authority correspondence, land claim submissions and community meeting records
• Court interpreting support material, church publications, community radio scripts and oral history

South African civil certificates are issued in English by Home Affairs, so a certified translation of a birth or marriage certificate is an English source job. Xitsonga certification comes up with affidavits, community documents and court records where evidence was given in the language, and with Mozambican paperwork that arrives in Portuguese alongside it.

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