Isabel Thomson from ProZ sat down with Christian Elongué to learn more about the The Association of Language Companies in Africa (ALCA) and their upcoming conference in Cape Town, South Africa, August 28–29 (2025), which ProZ is a sponsor of.
What drew you to the language industry?
I come from a bilingual country, Cameroon, where both French and English are official languages. Growing up in Cameroon, you are familiar with seeing a multilingual environment and, when I got to university, it was natural for me to study bilingual education. In 2022, when I decided to move out of the corporate world, I came back to the language industry by putting in place Kabod Language Services.
What inspired you to co-found the ALCA?
As a newcomer in any industry, one of the advantages is that you have a fresh way of approaching things. When I started Kabod and I put in place a language department, I could see that there was a lack of regulation.
There was a lack of collaboration among language companies. You could easily find translators or interpreters being part of a professional body at the national level, but there was no professional body at the continental level.
Even in the area of football, we have national federations of football and a continental body in Africa, CAF. At the global level we have FIFA. Why don't we have a continental body that will be able to advocate for the recognition of the economic rights of people who are in the language industry?
What kind of advocacy does the ALCA do?
Many people don't quite value the work of translators or interpreters. They think that the work that goes behind [language services] is “easy” when it's not the case. You can be very fluent in a language but a very poor interpreter or translator. The ability to speak a language does not make you a professional.
We miss market opportunities. Almost any company can, even though they are not based in Africa, even though they don't have expertise in African languages, just claim they can provide translation or interpretation service in African languages. The quality is not the best because, if the work that is being submitted to you is not of quality, and you do not have the language expertise or cultural understanding, some flaws easily pass on.
How do we strengthen our positioning in the global language service industry? Where do we start? Ensuring more members, especially language companies, secure benefits and advantages. There is still so much to do at the level of advocacy.
ALCA Conference 2024
Could you tell us about the upcoming conference?
This is our second conference; the first one was organized in August last year. This conference is a way for us to bring together language service providers, professionals, buyers. We’ll see how we can move the industry forward, and explore how AI technologies impact the demand of language services on the continent. How do we respond as a body of professionals? What are the challenges that individual freelancers are facing? What do we do to ensure that they are protected?
And could you please tell us a bit about the agenda?
There are lots of interesting topics populating the agenda. A panel discussion on the future of the language service industry in Africa, the industry 10 years from now. Charles Campbell will look at how to unleash the power of associations in the language industry. Paul Barlow will be focusing on how you sell in a distracted world.
My session is going to focus on collaboration, how do you accelerate growth through strategic collaboration? There's so much that we can learn from existing platforms like ProZ.
Emmanuel Clifford will focus on language policy; how the policy of the government influences how languages are taught and perceived. Brenda Lopez will focus on mentoring; how do you prepare the next generation of language professionals considering AI?
There are a lot of sessions on topics such as how we move to “industry 5.0” and strengthen the workforce, build bridges with global partners, and tap into the opportunities that are available in the global market.
Most of the time, LSPs on the continent are on the bottom line. Most of the time we get opportunities through a western client who comes and recruits the LSP in Africa [or individuals]. So how do we position ourselves? How do we strengthen our offer and value proposition so that we can see more and more LSPs from Africa securing large multinational contracts? The sessions are quite diverse and I believe that everybody will learn from the conference.