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Students and linguists from Makerere University have translated the open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox, into Luganda at a Translate@thon held on the campus in Kampala, Uganda last week.
The two-day gathering brought together almost 200 students and allowed them to make a practical contribution to their language’s presence in the digital age.
The Translate@thon was a partnership between Makerere University, Rhodes University and Translate.org.za, originators of the Translate@thon concept.
Translate.org.za created the Translate@thon concept and the translation software that allows hundreds of people to translate simultaneously.
Researchers from Rhodes had the idea to run a Translate@thon to coincide with a conference held in Uganda.
The Translate@thon concept has been used in similar events across South Africa. It involves bringing a number of mother tongue speakers together to translate a piece of software into their language.
The students made use of a web-based translation tool called Pootle to make it possible for all 200 students to translate simultaneously. After translating key aspects of the software they spent a large amount of time correcting technical and language errors.
A lot of work remains on the translations, the use of terms needs to be clarified, technical issues need to be resolved but as it stands the product is usable by a Luganda speaker.
A beta test release of the translated software is available from:
http://translate.org.za/content/view/1817/51/.
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Seems like we actually had almost 300 people there!
Also important to mention is that this work started with a migration of the old Mozilla Suite translations to Firefox 3.0. The original translations were spearheaded by Wire Lungabo, who many Tectonic readers will know, manager of Linux Solutions in Uganda.
[...] I’ve written quite a few posts on Appfrica in the past on computational linguistics and the potential for using the local languages of African users. Because literacy and multi-lingualism tend to be huge problems in African regions where education standards are poor, using local languages would potentially be a way to increase computer use among local users. At Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, students have undertaken an impressive project, translating Mozilla Firefox 3 into the local Ugandan language of Luganda. [...]
[...] article on Tectonic reporting the event explained the achievement by saying that the students’ work and [...]