Time to give the Afrikaans Thunderbird translation a spin as it is now an official Mozilla Thunderbird release. Thanks to all the hard work put in by Friedel and Samuel we made it into this release. There was much fixing of bugs to get the access keys correct and to fix some untranslated text.
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:
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.
There are now Afrikaans spell checkers available for Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0.0.*
Andreas upgraded the Afrikaans spell checker builder to create a valid 2.0 XPI so that the spell checkers will now work on 2.0.0.* versions of Thunderbird and Firefox. These have been placed on the Mozilla addons site, they’re in the sandbox for now, we hope that they will soon be available from the main site.
You can download or add a review (you must be logged into the sandbox).
You might also want to stay up-to-date with this Firefox bug which is replacing MySpell with Hunspell on Firefox and Thunderbird. The main benefit with Hunspell is that it handles aglutenation which will mean better Afrikaans suggestions and checking in the future.
Just for those of you who don’t read tectonic or Translate.org.za’s own front page. Afrikaans is officially in Firefox 2.0.0.4. Thanks need to go to:
This was a long process, we’ve been in beta for over 2 releases. But we are very happy that this is a high quality release.
Now we need to look at the other 10 languages and see how we can get those released.
Translate.org.za recently decided to work more closely with the upstream OpenOffice.org localisation process. In many ways this is partly because OpenOffice.org will be adopting Pootle to allow online translation for all localisation projects. But also because we’d like people going to the OpenOffice.org site to know about the Afrikaans translations.
As a result of this we now have our own Afrikaans project website which is directly accessible from the multilingual OpenOffice.org download page.
We are also now part of the official build process for localized efforts of OpenOffice.org and the first Afrikaans build already appeared in one of the recent 2.3 milestones.
The purpose of these builds are to allow testing of the localizations, so feel free to install and test this. We value your feedback.
We are still committed to providing our multilingual builds, but will either work a way to integrate those into the current process or build them as needed following official releases.
We’ve just uploaded South African builds of Firefox. We now have version 1.5.0.11, this solves the encoding bug picked up earlier this month. You can download XPIs or Windows .exe.
A rather strange and spurious bug in the Afrikaans Firefox has a fix, we’re just waiting for approval.
For those who must know the bug worked a bit like this… If the page you where wanting to view didn’t have an encoding set then Firefox tries the default encoding as set for your language. In Afrikaans we use ISO-8859-1. The only problem is it was specified as ‘ISO 8859-1′ - not the missing dash before 8859.
Thanks go to Schalk Heunis who gave us a report that allowed us to start the search.
The fix should go into Firefox 2.0.0.4 for Afrikaans. We hope to point you to some nightly builds to check the fix for us.
You can also fix it in your current version by doing the following:
We’re still not official and are still in beta. The biggest problem that we are aware of is that our dialogue sizes are still wrong in some places. Yes it sucks in that we have to manually change these and retest and Mozilla seems unable to work this out itself as other toolkits do 
But you can get the release and it should magically upgrade if you installed 2.0.0.2. Please help us identify any dialogues that are not the correct size so that we can correc them and that hopefully we’ll see 2.0.0.4 being the official release of Firefox in Afrikaans.
A fully localised computer lab, including the state of the art translations available for all 11 South African languages, has recently been set up at Rhodes University. This was an initiative within the SANTED (South African - Norwegian Tertiary Education Development) Programme in the School of Languages (African Languages Section), in collaboration with the Telkom Centre of Excellence in the Department of Computer Science.
The lab, hosted by the School of Languages, counts 30 machines, all dual-boot Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, of course). It features most of the software developed by Translate and hosted at http://downloads.translate.org.za. This includes all available localisations for OpenOffice, FireFox and Thunderbird, as well as spell-checkers for all languages and the SA keyboard. With the help of Friedel and Andrew (Rhodes IT) we also created nice shortcuts to switch language for OpenOffice in Windows. On the Linux side, Gnome is available in Afrikaans, Sesotho sa Leboa, isiXhosa and isiZulu.
This is the first computer lab at a South African tertiary institution to allow students to operate computers almost entirely in their language. We really hope to see similar initiatives springing up at other institutions.
We managed to get the Afrikaans localisation for Firefox in with version 2.0.0.2. It is not an official download yet, we were only upgraded to “beta” status. Hopefully we will be an official release in the next version of Firefox. Please download this and test it. This release means that it should update automatically in future without breaking the translations. Download this version for Windows, Linux (i686), and Mac OS X (universal binary).