invention

Some interesting articles to read when I came back from holiday. It seems Swahili free software stuff is moving forward in lots of fronts. Tomorrow I'm going up to Pretoria to train some of the KiLinux team on using ooo-build for building localized OpenOffice.org.

Kamusi Project Internet Living Swahili Dictionary is a good read, this is a great project.

Tanzanian government uses OSS for localisation shows how the government is realising the importance of free software.

Also found this article on the Guardian on Owning ideas a good read - not neccessarily technically right in everything, but has some good insight and is accessible to people unfamiliar with the debates... e.g. Patenting ideas rewards failure and makes success more difficult. ... This is madness. Ideas aren't things. They're much more valuable than that

Looks like Firefox 1.5 is going to be released shortly, thus making this a fun week Most of the issues in the translate toolkit for Firefox 1.5 have been resolved, there are still some that I'm working on but people seem able to produce their translations OK using it.

After being busy with lots of behind the scenes things and other work, I feel like I'm finally making progress on the following:

Building OpenOffice.org on Windows - I've been working with Michael Meeks to get ooo-build working nicely on Windows with the 2.0 series of OpenOffice.org builds, and my builds are running quite happily now. This will make it easier to manage patches, updating between versions etc (compared to using the standard OpenOffice.org build system). I plan to update the Windows building page on the go-oo Wiki as neccessary, some of my notes from build problems are in openofficebuild on the translate wiki.

Pootle - have fixed one or two small bugs and hope to keep on doing so, as well as planning to add better searching support so people can file bugs or suggestions for translations more easily.

Translate Toolkit - actually integrated some patches (from Matthias Klose) - there are quite a few more on bugs.wordforge.org sitting around for me to process, but its nice to be off the ground.

South African OpenOffice.org - which is what the build work above is for: I am now building OOo 2.0rc2 successfully, need to move to rc3, incorporate the latest changes, and get our branding, spellcheckers etc in.

Long time no blog ...

We're releasing a South African version of OpenOffice.org in all 11 languages. Some are still in Beta... This is based on milestone 128, and we actually did our own Windows build (no minor task!!!)

We'd like to get testing done on this release, so any volunteers are welcome!

This quote from the BBC's Have your Say: Microsoft after 30 years is really exactly the opposite of what we are about:

Microsoft has changed the world. At this point, the fact that they have such a large percentage of the market is a good thing. It has also guaranteed that English will be the language of the world for many generations to come. Steph, Decatur, Georgia USA

I hope in at most 10 years time, people's perception will be different

A few language related news items from South Africa over the last few months:

Firstly, the Pan South African Language Board decries the loss of human languages but only has International Mother Tongue Day and such like as solutions. Surely this is a feather-weight solution to a hippo-sized problem? For many people they'll pay as much attention as to International Talk Like a Pirate Day (or less). We need rather concerted efforts on the part of governments and civil society around the world.

For example, Mbeki raising the issue of language neglect with the National House of Traditional Leaders. This is great. Interestingly, he quotes the above report to say that in South Africa, only Afrikaans is defended by its speakers. Declining interest in African languages is reported in the Department of Education.

What can we do to fight these things? Promote the use of diverse languages in court, for a start - the article illustrates the kind of difficulties of encouraging multilingualism when there are several languages at stake. But it's a road that needs to be travelled. Fortunately the South African constitution mandates government promotion of languages. For translate.org.za's part, we're trying to ensure that people can use the language of their choice on their computers.

Behind all this is a mentality issue: are we as South Africans just going to imitate the west or are we going to celebrate our uniqueness and diversity? And keep a good sense of humour at the same time - sometimes localization goes awry.

Unrelatedly, I found this quote fascinating: Rebecca Wanjiku on the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva, 2003:

Being my first time to attend intergovernmental negotiations, the chance was an eye opener for me. I witnessed "reputable" governments opposing press freedom, locking out major input from the civil society and at the end of it, I understood why my government never discloses its contribution to the public.

Hopefully South Africa will not allow the many winds and waves of global and local thinking to divert us from what is truly important.

Just leaving to go to a training camp for the Swahili Localization Project in Arusha, Tanzania ... should be fun but already missing Danielle and James and I haven't left yet!

Will be quite a comprehensive training camp and I'll be doing a session on using the translate tools for localizing Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc...

slashdot mentioned an article entitled Language may shape human thought in which a psychologist argues for a variant of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the basis of a study of the Pirah� tribe.

On closer examination his logic is fairly interesting ... extracts from the article illustrate this:

• "There are not really occasions in their daily lives where the Pirah� need to count" explains Gordon
• The language, Pirah�, is known as a "one, two, many" language because it only contains words for "one" and "two" - for all other numbers, a single word for "many" is used.
• In order to test if this prevented members of the tribe from perceiving higher numbers, Gordon set seven Pirah� a variety of tasks.
• For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon's pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer.
• Gordon says this is the first convincing evidence that a language lacking words for certain concepts could actually prevent speakers of the language from understanding those concepts.

None of this (at least in the article) contains any justification as to why the perceived lack of the Pirah� to compare numbers of objects comes from the lack of number words in their language, rather than from the fact that they never need to count in daily life by Gordon's own explanation.

From an article on the Small Claims Court in the Southern Suburbs Tatler, our local freebie newspaper:

The third case that afternoon involved a Xhosa-speaking man who, apparently, did some building work for a Xhosa-speaking homeowner and did not get paid for it. The two parties could not converse in English, and the commissioner had to rely on a friend of the defendant to translate. It soon became apparent that the arguments were too complex for the now bewildered commissioner to make a ruling without the presence of an official translator. The case was postponed.

So they may still get a ruling eventually, but it will be more difficult. Unfortunately language inequality is still a reality in South Africa.

Met up with Mahle today who is interested in making a Xhosa Children's Bible or at least part of one.

Great idea.

Last night at church we had the final of three training seessions on being a multi-cultural community in South Africa. Jabu spoke about his experiences in the struggle, going to prison, what God did in his life. It reminded me of The Heavenly Man. Then Charles from the Foundation for Church-led restitution spoke about giving his farm for restitution to those who have been wronged, and Alastair spoke about restitution too ... Steve wrapped it up with presenting the education fund Jubilee is starting as a part of restitution.

Afterwards spoke to Jabu, he said he'd heard about the translation work, and wants the Zulu programs ... couldn't believe its free software ... said "it'll help people learn computers..." so hopefully translate.org.za is also doing something to redress the injustices of the past. Gave me extra motivation to release the Zulu translation, and make sure we're rounding off any bugs.

Great article on Automating Government with e-Governance in India talks about the need to simplify localization of Linux software:

Additional attention should be paid to simplifying the steps to add additional language support to the various Linux applications in order to further advance Linux adoption by government agencies. Finally, improved documentation will provide the needed boost to the many open-source supporters itching for a chance to add their favorite language to the many already supported by Linux.

That's exactly what translate.sourceforge.net is about. Anyone welcome to help out :-)