Report Comments in Afrikaans, isiZulu and isiXhosa: A Practical Guide
How to write school report comments and parent messages in a family’s home language — what belongs in the LoLT, what belongs in the home language, and what to check before sending.
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By the School Reports SA team – built for South African educators
South Africa has twelve official languages. Your report cards are written in one of them — whichever your school uses as its Language of Learning and Teaching. The families reading those reports are not always comfortable in that language.
That gap is not a small one. A caregiver who reads isiXhosa fluently and English haltingly will get the gist of an English report and miss the part that matters: what to actually do about it. The comment you spent four minutes crafting becomes a paragraph they skim and file.
Two different problems
It helps to separate them, because they have different answers.
The report card itself
This is a formal record. It is written in the school’s LoLT, and that is not a choice an individual teacher makes at report time. For Afrikaans-medium and parallel-medium schools, that means the comment needs to be in Afrikaans — properly in Afrikaans, in the register a rapport actually uses, not English phrasing with Afrikaans words substituted in.
Talking to the family
This is where the language of the home matters most, and it applies in every school, including English-medium ones. A message home about a learner who is falling behind, or one you want to praise, lands differently when the caregiver reads it in the language they think in.
The practical upshot
Report comments follow the school. Parent communication should follow the family. Those are different decisions, and it is fine for the same learner to have an Afrikaans report comment and an isiZulu message home.
Whatever language you use, the comment should explain the learner’s achievement clearly. See our CAPS achievement levels guide for what meritorious, substantial and the other national ratings mean, with the code and mark band for each.
What School Reports SA does
You choose the language before you generate. The comment is written directly in that language — not drafted in English and run through a translator. That distinction matters more than it sounds: a translated report comment reads like a translated report comment, and parents notice.
Currently supported: English, Afrikaans, isiZulu and isiXhosa. The same choice applies when you refine a comment, so asking for something shorter does not quietly hand you back English.
What we will not do
We have deliberately not switched on the remaining official languages yet. Sepedi, Setswana, Sesotho, Xitsonga, siSwati, Tshivenda and isiNdebele are all built into the system, but none of them will appear in your language list until a first-language speaker has reviewed real generated comments and signed off on the register and terminology.
The reason is simple. Awkward machine-written text in a parent’s home language is worse than English. English at least reads as a neutral institutional choice. Clumsy isiNdebele reads as carelessness about exactly the people you were trying to respect.
South African Sign Language is an official language and is not on the roadmap here, for the straightforward reason that it has no standard written form and a report card is a written document.
Three things to check in a non-English comment
- Subject names. These should appear exactly as they do on your report card. Do not let a generated comment invent a translation for a subject name your school prints in English.
- The learner’s name. In isiZulu and isiXhosa, watch that the name has not picked up a noun-class prefix or been inflected. Names stay as they are.
- Register. Read it aloud. A school report is semi-formal written language, not conversation. If it sounds like a WhatsApp message, regenerate it.
You are still the author
This applies in any language, but it matters more in one you read less often: review every comment before it goes out. The tool drafts; you approve. Your name is on the report.
A note on what this is for
Multilingual reporting is not a feature to show off. It exists because the point of a report comment is that somebody reads it and does something. Every sentence a caregiver cannot follow is a sentence that failed at its only job.
Further reading
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