dB

Casablanca and Madrid

I spent a number of days in Madrid with Javier Sola from the Khmer localisation effort. Javier hails from Madrid so I saw a number of interesting things: centre of Madrid, Toledo (the old capitol). Mostly the tourist part was about sampling the food of Spain - wonderful. The real work was to sit down and work out a project proposal and plan for a large scale localisation tools project which would cover tools, Pootle, filter, etc. This was a very successful meeting and I think we've got things well thought out and sorted. Now for approval from some donors.

The second part of the trip was at the Pan African Localisation meeting in Casablanca. Apparantly Morrocco is really beautiful - Casabalanca is then a very very poor reflection. Did lots of shopping in the Medina, wife and kids are happy. Got Javier to do all the negotiation. The workshop was frustratingly more full of talk then action, but I guess you need a high level view for something that attempt to cover Africa. Most people present were academics, ie localisation is about keyboard, fonts, standard and entry methods. Yip those are important but they are also easy to hide behind if you see the daunting task of translation. Clearly an academic approach, translation is the hardest part because it involves people, lots of them. The other tasks are easy to do on your own. We will see over time what this workshops turns into.

I met Richard Ishida (Japanese name, British guy - his wife is Japanese and his English surname is not exactly complimentary when pronounced in Japanese). He create a great offline tool for looking up Unicode character, etc. Its called UniView (Warning: large download). Also look at the Unicode character picker which is useful if you need to enter some text in an unusual script.

Other interesting people were Lee van Munster of web-lingo who are translating cellphones into many South African languages. Also met Chippo from Malawi who is looking at starting a localisation project for Chichiwe.

Some ideas that came out of the workshop that I would like to pursue are:

• Locale files for Africa: Alberto (from the Tanzanian project) proposed this. Simple paper form that you can fill in and email or fax for your locale to be created.
• Language map of African: Nice map of Africa with all the data about official languages, populations, keyboard issues, etc.
• Localisation workshop with web-lingo in Cape Town.
• Sharing glossaries: we'll work with web-lingo to extract and share glossaries. Perhaps this will start a sharing culture amongst translators which will improve translations.