Yle will launch news in Arabic and Somali in autumn 2024
Yle Uutiset news service will improve its service for minority languages by launching news in Arabic and Somali on 23 September. The news serving these language groups is an experiment that will last around a year. The journalist for the Arabic-language news is Esraa Ismaeel and the journalists for the Somali-language news are Wali Hashi and Horio Abdulkadir.
Yle has previously published news in several languages. During the pandemic, Yle published news in Somali, Arabic, Kurdish and Persian. After the Russian war of aggression began, Yle Uutiset news services started publishing Ukrainian-language news. Yle Novosti provides news in Russian and Yle News in English. News in one's own native language helps people integrate into and understand Finnish society better. Multilingual news also directs people to read news in plain language and lowers the threshold for studying Finnish.
Under the Act on Yleisradio Oy, Yle must provide services in other languages spoken in Finland, as applicable, and to support the preservation of Finnish cultural heritage, promote tolerance, equality and cultural diversity, and also provide a programme offering for minority and special groups.
Arabic and Somali are among the largest foreign languages spoken in Finland
Finland has around half a million residents whose native language is something other than Finnish, Swedish or Sami. The number of these people is expected to increase in the future. At the moment, there are approximately 40,000 native speakers of Arabic in Finland, while around 25,000 people speak Somali as their native language.
”News about these large immigrant communities gives us a more comprehensive view of the increasingly diverse Finnish society. From the point of view of good relations within the population, it is important that we know each other’s values, opinions and traditions better. In addition, news in one's own language can help individuals integrate into Finland as their understanding of society increases,” says Marko Krapu, Yle’s Managing Producer of Multilingual News.
The Somali news is delivered by Wali Hashi and Horio Abdulkadir. Arabic-language news is delivered by Esraa Ismaeel. Video news is published on weekdays, and the main publication platforms are YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram and TikTok, from which users are directed to Yle Areena and Yle.fi.
”Representatives of these language groups are difficult to reach through traditional channels. They actively use different social media platforms, so we are present wherever they are. There is also a lot of disinformation spread on these social media platforms. For example, Russia targets its propaganda to Somali and Arab-speaking youth. It is important that we deliver to them verified and truthful information,” say Hashi, Abdulkadir and Ismaeel, describing the importance of native-language news.
Our digitalised society, which is dominated by social media platforms, is changing people’s access to information – and also the ways in which social power is used. This easily exposes people to disinformation, for example. Multilingual news is one of the ways in which Yle is renewing its operations in the changing digitalised society.
Yle’s news production utilises modern technological solutions, such as artificial intelligence-assisted transcription and machine translation. However, the translations and transcriptions are always edited by humans. The multilingual editorial team continues the development work initiated by Yle’s previous language-specific editorial teams, seeking innovative ways to serve new language minorities using artificial intelligence. Multilingual news is produced efficiently with a small team using the latest AI technology.
You can read the press release in Arabic here
You can read the press release in Somali here