MA African Languages and Academic Communication

Overview

Academic communication in African universities fails when a French abstract is a poor calque of English theory, or when a local-language radio script is treated as unscholarly. This MA starts with that hierarchy. You will edit, translate with documented method, and write for mixed audiences without pretending this university employs AU cultural agencies. African Future University requires honesty about competence: you work in languages you can evidence. Digital publishing is taught as PDFs, radio, and messaging apps that survive poor connectivity—the actual channels of tuition-free online study and public scholarship. The award is academic. It is not a civil-service language post, not a simultaneous-interpreting licence, and not an ethnographic field permit. It is for people who must keep multilingual academic text honest when the only printer is in town. You will compare a campus notice genre with a radio script and a scholarly abstract in the same language pair. Identity-checked exams test documented method, not a decorative list of tongues the candidate cannot actually use. Tuition-free online study is the delivery mode; print and radio remain first-class scholarly channels here. MA African Languages and Academic Communication is taught as one award, not a list of unrelated modules. The published length is 18 months, and the credit total is 36. Students move from Academic English and Academic French as Contact Varieties through Academic English and Academic French as Contact Varieties; African Language Standardisation Debates as Practice; Terminology for Higher Education; Documented Method versus Invisible Labour; Untranslatables and Calques; Editing Multilingual Manuscripts, and finish on Ethics Dossier. Each course has a question, a method, and a submission. In this field, students justify a marketing decision with evidence rather than a slogan. Reading is a brief, a channel note, and a measurement plan. The artefact a marker expects is a campaign or content recommendation with audience, channel, and measure. The award is built so that a graduate can do the following in practice: Produce an academic text that travels EN/FR and one evidenced African language Document translation choices and untranslatables Design a low-bandwidth publishing or radio package Teaching assumes the student can read a source, attempt a problem before the seminar, and revise after feedback. Attendance at live seminars is part of the design. The capstone or final course must use the methods of the earlier courses; a project that ignores them does not pass. The pages for each course name the topics that are examined. Those topics are the syllabus. A brochure line is not a substitute for them.

Thirty-six credits: registers and terminology, translation ethics, digital-rural genres, and a language-pair capstone. Identity-checked exams. Competence is evidenced per language, not assumed continent-wide.