Kseniya Yadchenko

I write about Africa through its languages

I read sources in English, French and Arabic, and write about what is happening to the languages of the continent — from manuscripts to machine translation.

Kseniya Yadchenko
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Writing

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Short form

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About

I'm interested in what happens to a language when everyone speaks about it except the people who speak it.

I'm a student at the Faculty of International Relations, BSU, studying Africa and reading sources in French and Arabic — the languages the region is discussed in from outside. Hence my interest in what is said from inside, and how it gets written down.

I take research work and turn it into something people finish reading.

Education
BSU, Faculty of International Relations — African studies
Topics
Language policy, writing systems and manuscripts, NLP for low-resource languages, field linguistics
Published in
Sysblok
Location
Minsk, Belarus

Two thousand languages. Almost everything written about them is written by people who can't read the sources.

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For editors

Working languages
I write in Russian and English.
Formats

A difficult subject laid out so a reader without special training can follow it.

I read the paper in full, check the conclusions and explain what it actually shows.

A conversation with a researcher or a speaker of the language — in Russian, English or French.

The whole picture: who is working on what, where the argument is, and what is still unresolved.

A first-person piece for when a subject has a clear position worth naming.

Length
Usually 1,000–3,000 words, but I will work with any length.
Subjects
Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb · language policy and education · writing systems and manuscript traditions · computational linguistics and low-resource languages
How I work
I read the research in the original and go to the authors for comment.
Turnaround
A standard piece takes 7–10 days.
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Translation

Language pairs
From English, French and Arabic into Russian. From Russian into English.
What I translate
Research articles and book chapters · abstracts and conference papers · grant applications · project reports
Fields
The humanities and social sciences: linguistics, anthropology, sociology, African studies, history, language policy.
How I work
I check terminology against the sources and flag anything contested for discussion with the author.
Turnaround
A 40,000-character article takes about a week.
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Contact