Archive for July, 2007

Free Software empowers African languages

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

At the Pan African Localisation workshop and Blitz held in Morocco in February 2007, various Africans gathered to discuss localisation. As a practical component of this gathering Translate.org.za lead an exercise to create locales for the various languages spoken by participants at the event.

Once again Free and Open Source software demonstrated its power by allowing people to change software to meet their needs, instead of hoping that one day a proprietary vendor might care enough to meet their needs.

Not all participants managed to complete their locales, but 4 of them did and today marks the day on which their locales have been integrated and verified for inclusion in the next version of OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 is scheduled to be released in early September and will include locales for:

  • Sango - Marcel Diki-Kidiri
  • Lingala - Denis Moyogo Jacquerye
  • Luganda - Martin Benjamin (and others)
  • English (Ghana) - Paa Kwesi Imbeah

For speakers of these languages, an estimated 5,5+ million people, this work has impact in that they can for the first time correctly choose dates and times for their language and country and adjust the behaviour of OpenOffice.org to cater for other cultural conventions.

But more critically in the long term it means that they can now create documents correctly tagged as having being written in that language. For most Africans who do not have locale support for their language they will traditionally write the document in their language while the computer assumes it is written in American English. While this works it is causing inestimable long term damage; search engines cannot find Lingala documents, we cannot draw text from Sango documents to help build spell checkers or do language research. But now for these languages and for users using OpenOffice.org they can create documents correctly labeled and in the future help researchers and users of their content access it correctly.

The event was hosted by the IDRC as part of their broad effort to assist localisation in Africa and was coordinated and run by Tactical Tech.

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