Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice.org In Swahili
linhux writes "A reported on Gnuheter (in Swedish) and elsewhere, OpenOffice.org has been translated to Swahili in a joint collaboration effort of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) and a company called IT+46, and funded by the university and Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. Neither Microsoft Office nor Windows supports Swahili. Currently, only the Tanzanian dialect has been completed, but Kenyan, Congo and Ugandan dialects are on their way. It's called Jambo OpenOffice and is part of the Kilinux Open Swahili Localization Project."
Jambo is swahili for hello (AFAIK).
The Baganda (a tribe) whose native language is Luganda and from who the country name Uganda was coined, are very proud people. To this end there is a Mozilla project that was completed in Luganda. http://www.mail-archive.com/lug@linux.or.ug/msg015 66.html
I wish them success, but doubt there will be any impact in that country called Uganda.
Why the joking about the Swahili translation? Yes, it seens to be a small market. But please remember that Swahili is something like the 7th most commonly spoken language in the world. It's a well-known trade language in East- and Central Africa, and in a hugely polyglot culture, the trade languages are very important. Swahili is an official language in Kenya, and Tanzania, and probably in Rwanda and Uganda as well. Think about this: it could be that the proliferation of high-tech tools in underdeveloped areas is hindered by the lack of working software in local languages. Would you like to learn Swahili just to read the help files in Gnumeric? This is a big deal - most especially because it was done by Swahili speaking techs at a Swahili speaking school (Okay, so Tanzanian colleges teach in English mostly - all the students speak Kiswahili.) The fact that a local community took sofware and adapted it to their needs is the very essence of open source. Nafurahi Chuoo Kikuu Cha Dar Es Salaam cha kufasiri OO.O! (I love the University of Dar for translating Open Office.)
Yup.
The official language in Tanzania is Swahili, so a translation there makes some sense. But the official language in Kenya is English, so it seems a bit silly. It's also considered cool to speak English (and uncool to speak Swahili) in Kenya, unlike Tanzania.
As an additional note, the signs BP gas stations in Kenya say "welcome" in English, while the ones in Tanzania say "welcome" in Swahili.
Not certain if you work with AIDS clinics as well, but if you do you might pass this link along. Its a pretty complete GPL'd patient medical database, designed to be used in AIDS clinics in the developing world to allow doctors in the first world to help with diagnoses and allow a high level of transparency. It has nice reporting tools as well and is fully internationalized.
A major new version is due out in the next couple weeks, completely rewritten in object-oriented perl (rather than PHP).
"Why is it progress to do something to insure that more people are isolated from one another?" Is being able to localize software so that those who don't speak english can have a lower barrier to scale in order to acquaint themselves with technology a process of isolation? Or are you so blinded by the dominance of the english language to imagine that other languages (in this case spoken by at least 40 million people) don't matter or are not necessary due to the superior nature of english. What you don't realize is that an acquaintance with technology would help these folks to have a wider exposure to the whole world and consequently make them less parochial and perhaps more friendly in terms of openness to new ideas. I've also noticed that so many people here keep making the assumption that the fact that its africa means most of them don't have access to computers. I grew up in a west african country and I can tell you that the penetration level of computing is almost 60% in a nation that up till a few years ago could not boast of any reasonable network and thats a country with a population of about 120 million people. Get a grip folks.
All straight things must come to a bend
or is a database created- with pointers to a 'use this word' list, so that the 3rd and further languages can be added by merely updating the list of available translations?
This facility is provided by the GNU C library (see chapters 6, 7, 8). You just need to provide the message catalogs. Of course, you translate whole messages, not just words, since you want to convey meaning, and word-by-word translations come out sounding stupid.
And, of course, internationalization is not just message translation for something like OpenOffice. There's stuff like input methods, which way the text goes on the screen (not all languages go left to right), paper sizes, etc.
This is definitely not true. I'm not trying to flame the parent post, I just want people to know the facts. Having lived in both Tanzania and Kenya, I should know.
It is true that a lot more Kenyans than Tanzanians speak English. That is simply because of the direction each government has taken since there respective independence - but outside major cities a lot of people little or no English.
It is also a matter of pride for Tanzanians. The reason they still speak a lot of Swahili is because of a concerted effort by the government to keep it in use and that there is a much higher degree of nationalism in Tanzania than in Kenya.
Actually, Esperanto HAS evolved.
e volve
http://esperanto.org/us/USEJ/world/kontraux.html#
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Free software has a natural immunity from that.
This sounds like the same logic behind "Linux will never get a virus because it is open source."
What exactly about open source software makes it immune from cultural mistakes?
...is the only reason for this news that Micro$oft hasn't done it yet? I mean we don't normally see news on /. on other languages being added to big projects. I'm just saying...
(Posting AC for obvious reasons)
Well, sort of. You can write Yiddish given Hebrew the same way that you can write French given English. There are minor differences that might not hinder understanding, but they change style.
There are some two-letter ligatures that are treated in Yiddish as single characters, see for example this virtual Yiddish Keyboard. Note the line above the "feh" glyph, and the patach-yod-yod, which are distinctly Yiddish.
For info on rendering Yiddish on computers, see Understanding Yiddish Information Processing.
Re: the idea that Yiddish is comparable to Klingon in terms of its obscurity, before the nazis murdered most of the Yiddish speakers and caused the survivors to want to forget their Yiddish roots, Yiddish was culturally vibrant, with great creativity in literature, theater, music, newspapers, movies, etc. Most of this vitality disppeared in the latter half of the 20th century, but there is a small strong willed group of people working to keep Yiddish secular culture alive, and another group of religious Yiddish speakers who keep Yiddish alive as the spoken language of their Jewish heritage. No offense to the fans of Klingon (nuqneH!), but the situations of Yiddish and Klingon aren't that similar.
btw, I do have a Yiddish-Esperanto dictionary at home, there's a combination that inspired someone enough to product a fully fledged hardcover bound dictionary.