PDF vertalen naar Aymara

Aymara spelling runs on apostrophes, and that is where a PDF usually breaks

Aymara is written in the Latin alphabet, which makes it look like an easy target for automated translation. It is not. The unified alphabet agreed in the mid-1980s and adopted officially in Bolivia and Peru gives the language only three vowels, a, i and u, and then builds a large consonant inventory out of five points of articulation that each come in three flavours: plain, aspirated and ejective. Plain p, t, ch, k and q become aspirated ph, th, chh, kh and qh, and ejective p', t', ch', k' and q'. The apostrophe is not decoration. It is a letter. Change it and you change the word: the difference between a plain stop and an ejective one separates unrelated meanings the way b and p do in English.

This is exactly the character that word processors, PDF generators and copy-paste pipelines mangle. A straight ASCII apostrophe, a typographic right single quotation mark and the modifier letter apostrophe all look near-identical on screen but are three different Unicode code points. Autocorrect converts the first into the second without asking. The result is a document that still reads correctly to a human eye but no longer matches itself in a search box, sorts oddly, and fails any automated check against a wordlist. Vowel length has the same problem from a different direction: it is marked with a diaeresis, giving ä, ï and ü, and a font that ships only the Western European core will render those three as blank boxes or silently drop the marks, which turns a long vowel into a short one and, again, into a different word.

There is also a live spelling debate. Bolivian and Peruvian institutions do not always write the same word the same way, and a great deal of published Aymara predates the unified alphabet entirely, using Spanish-influenced conventions with c, hu and qh scattered differently. If your source PDF is an older community publication or a scanned mission-era text, expect its orthography to differ from what a modern Bolivian ministry would produce. DocTranslator keeps whatever characters the translation produces intact through the rebuild of the PDF, so the apostrophes and diaereses that survive into the output are the ones the text actually needs.

Who reads Aymara, and what they need translated

Roughly 1.7 million people speak Aymara, almost all of them on the high altiplano around Lake Titicaca. Bolivia has the largest community, concentrated in the La Paz, El Alto and Oruro areas, and Aymara is one of the indigenous languages named as official in the 2009 Bolivian constitution. Southern Peru accounts for most of the rest, in the Puno region and along the border, where native languages hold official status in the zones where they predominate. Northern Chile has a smaller population in the Arica and Tarapacá regions. It is worth being clear about one thing: Aymara belongs to its own small language family and is not a variety of Quechua, even though centuries of contact on the same plateau have left the two sharing a lot of vocabulary and a similar suffixing shape.

Nearly every adult speaker is also fluent in Spanish, so the working pair in the region is usually Spanish and Aymara rather than English and Aymara. Requests reaching an English-language service tend to come from researchers, development organisations, church bodies and diaspora families. The documents that show up most often are:

• Community consultation packs for mining, water rights and land use on the altiplano, where Bolivian rules require material to reach affected communities in a language they actually read
• Public health information from the Bolivian and Peruvian health services, including maternal health, altitude medicine and vaccination material
• Bilingual intercultural school material, teacher guides and literacy workbooks produced under Bolivia's language rights legislation, which expects public servants to work in an indigenous language
• Civil registry certificates, land titles and community statutes held by rural municipalities and ayllus
• Ethnographic and linguistic research: field notes, interview transcripts, grammars and dictionaries, often with mixed Aymara, Spanish and English on the same page
• Bible portions, hymnals, catechisms and liturgical material, which make up a large share of everything ever printed in the language
• NGO-projectrapporten, subsidiedocumenten en radioscripts voor de Aymara-talige zenders rond El Alto

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