Translate.org.za Development Blog

Whose blogging in your language? No one it seems. We’ve just set up planets for all the official languages of South Africa. So that we can pull all the mother-tongue blogs together.

What is a planet? Well it is simply a page that pulls stories via RSS from various blogs. But its easier to understand if you look at the Afrikaans planet (one of our staff decided that the correct translation for bloggers in Afrikaans should be boernaliste - we’ll wait for someone to take offence)

The results? Rather disappointing. There seem to be lots of blogs in Afrikaans, we haven’t added 1% of what we’ve seen. In the other languages? Nada. We found one Sotho blog… all in English. One Xhosa blog that seemed to have died some time in the past. Come on guys start blogging.

Found a blog that we need to add? Please email it to info@translate.org.za.

We’ve been contacted by the .ZA domain name authority for input as to whether South Africa needs to allow the registration of doamins with non-ASCII characters found in our languages. Generally Translate.org.za supports this but we are unaware of the consequence in terms of fishing or confusion for users.

Ever noticed how some websites just magically know what language you speak? Well, that is because your browser tells them your preferred languages. Have you never seen this? See this description on how to configure your browser. Show the world what language you speak! Google is one site that might respond in this way if your browser is set to Afrikaans, Sotho, Zulu or Xhosa. Pootle, our web based translation system, can now also do this, but we still need more translations in our South African languages. You can help by translating Pootle.