The Crosslingual Memory Archive (CMA) is an ongoing project, a born-digital archive that curates, aligns, and represents an initial corpus of 136 Western poems and 90 African oral stories across English, Fon, French, and Yoruba languages.
Designed as a public platform, CMA contains a corpus of 136 poems, comprising 102 translations: 24 English and 10 French original poems, totaling 34 source poems, which are translated into three languages to create a parallel alignment, allowing readers to view each poem in four matching language versions. The 24 English poems are translated into French, and the 10 French poems are translated into English. The 34 source poems are further translated into Fon and Yoruba.
Also, CMA contains 30 podcasts of oral stories: 20 in Fon and 10 in Yoruba. Each story is translated into English and French. By mediating between the Western canon and the low-resource African expressive systems, CMA positions the four languages as equal literary partners, and its tetrad builds a balanced alphabetical alignment that reveals equitable cross-reading. I used AI tools during the translations. However, I made the final decision myself, in consultation with co-native speakers, focusing on criteria such as readability, fluency, comprehension, and testing.
I used Text Encoding Initiative to encode the texts and then published them through WordPress. Lastly, CMA explores cultural memory, visually popularizing African traditions through a StoryMap (using StoryMap.JS) that includes cultural symbols and sites, traditions, and royal heritage. Accompanying this is a royal Timeline (using Timeline.JS) of the kingdoms to which the Fon and Yoruba languages belong.
David Achodo 