---
language: 
- eng
- afr
- nbl
- xho
- zul
- nso
- sep
- tsn
- ssw
- ven
- tso
pretty_name: "The Vuk'uzenzele South African Multilingual Corpus"
tags:
- multilingual
- government
license: "cc-by-4.0"
task_categories:
- translation
arxiv: 2303.03750
---

# The Vuk'uzenzele South African Multilingual Corpus

## About Dataset
The dataset was obtained from the South African government magazine Vuk'uzenzele, created by the [Government Communication and Information System (GCIS)](https://www.gcis.gov.za/). 
The original raw PDFs were obtatined from the [Vuk'uzenzele website](https://www.vukuzenzele.gov.za/).

The datasets contain government magazine editions in 11 languages, namely:

|  Language  | Code  |  Language  | Code |
|------------|-------|------------|-------|
| English    | (eng) | Sepedi     | (sep) |
| Afrikaans  | (afr) | Setswana   | (tsn) |
| isiNdebele | (nbl) | Siswati    | (ssw) |
| isiXhosa   | (xho) | Tshivenda  | (ven) |
| isiZulu    | (zul) | Xitstonga  | (tso) |
| Sesotho    | (nso) |
**Note:** The languages use the ISO 639-2 language codes.

The data is split by language in JSONL format and each row is of the form:
```
{
    "title": "Title for article", 
    "author": "Author Name or Vukuzenzele", 
    "text": "Article text", 
    "edition": "Linked Magazine edition", 
    "language_code": "ISO 639-2 language code"
}
```

## Disclaimer

This dataset contains machine-readable data extracted from PDF documents, from https://www.vukuzenzele.gov.za/, provided by the Government Communication Information System (GCIS). While efforts were made to ensure the accuracy and completeness of this data, there may be errors or discrepancies between the original publications and this dataset. No warranties, guarantees or representations are given in relation to the information contained in the dataset. The members of the Data Science for Societal Impact Research Group bear no responsibility and/or liability for any such errors or discrepancies in this dataset. The Government Communication Information System (GCIS) bears no responsibility and/or liability for any such errors or discrepancies in this dataset. It is recommended that users verify all information contained herein before making decisions based upon this information.

## Authors

- Vukosi Marivate - [@vukosi](https://twitter.com/vukosi)
- Andani Madodonga
- Daniel Njini
- Richard Lastrucci
- Isheanesu Dzingirai
- Jenalea Rajab

## Citation

**Paper**

[Preparing the Vuk'uzenzele and ZA-gov-multilingual South African  multilingual corpora](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.03750)

> @inproceedings{lastrucci-etal-2023-preparing,
    title = "Preparing the Vuk{'}uzenzele and {ZA}-gov-multilingual {S}outh {A}frican multilingual corpora",
    author = "Richard Lastrucci and Isheanesu Dzingirai and Jenalea Rajab and Andani Madodonga and Matimba Shingange and Daniel Njini and Vukosi Marivate",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourth workshop on Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL 2023)",
    month = may,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Dubrovnik, Croatia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.rail-1.3",
    pages = "18--25"
}

**Dataset**

Vukosi Marivate, Andani Madodonga, Daniel Njini, Richard Lastrucci, Isheanesu Dzingirai, Jenalea Rajab. **The Vuk'uzenzele South African Multilingual Corpus**, 2023

> @dataset{marivate_vukosi_2023_7598540,
  author       = {Marivate, Vukosi and
                  Njini, Daniel and
                  Madodonga, Andani and
                  Lastrucci, Richard and
                  Dzingirai, Isheanesu
                  Rajab, Jenalea},
  title        = {The Vuk'uzenzele South African Multilingual Corpus},
  month        = feb,
  year         = 2023,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.7598539},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7598539}
}

Licences
-------
* License for Data - [CC 4.0 BY](LICENSE.data.md)
* Licence for Code - [MIT License](LICENSE.md)