The Crosslingual Memory Archive (CMA) is a born-digital archive that curates, aligns, and represents 34 selected poems across four languages–English, Fon, French, and Yoruba. Designed as a public platform, CMA contains an initial corpus of 136 poems, comprising 102 translations: 24 English and 10 French original poems, totaling 34 source poems.
Each original poem is translated into three additional 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.
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 rather than a hegemony. I used artificial intelligence tools as a support system during the translation. However, I made the final decision myself, in consultation with other native speakers, focusing on criteria such as readability, fluency, comprehension, and testing. I used the Text Encoding Initiative to encode the texts and then published them through WordPress.
CMA also 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 Timeline (using Timeline.JS) of the various, earliest kings of Dahomey and Oyo. The StoryMap and the Timeline are then published on WordPress. Overall, CMA is designed as a mediating and decolonial initiative that embraces community engagement in the fine-tuning of the corpus. As a means of recovering underrepresented languages from digital invisibility, CMA intervenes by responding to the lack of resources for indigenous languages like Fon and Yoruba.
David Achodo 