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With so many people now using open source software the people at Translate.org.za are hard at work releasing versions of Firefox, Open Office, Thunderbird and more into the 11 official languages of South Africa.
Yesterday they announced that an Afrikaans version of the Firefox 3 beta was available for download.
They also have a South African keyboard available and spell checkers for local languages.
If your mother tongue is not English and you would like to use your software in your home language you need to take a look at these :
A glance at the Translate.org.za news page gives much information about the state of languages and their use in local software - worth a look.
A feather in the cap for our local open source software translators is that their translation tools are now also used by the One Laptop Per Child project, as well as Sun Microsystems for the translation of OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.org. Well done to the folks at Translate - more South Africans making a global impact!
3 comments:
These guys doing great things. I saw a segment about them on BBC news last night - wow!
Translate have been doing great work for a number of years. It's fantastic that a) they are being recognised by the broader online community and b) by the big players in the open source sphere.
It just shows the power of open source, hopefully this will be big driver in getting mass adoption of these tool in SA
- Robin : Nice to see a South African company being recognized abroad.
- Eishman : I believe you are correct in surmising that when open source is available in local versions it will become far more attractive to the local market. This is a rather interesting thought as I would have that the open source price tag would have been the definitive deciding factor for local businesses and other interests.
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