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things in place it is possible to do all the other language interventions that are
needed. You can’t translate any application without a locale, you can’t enter
content into a blog or wikipedia without a keyboard and you can’t see any of
this content in documents or on the web without a font for your language.
All the exotic language applications such as automatic speech recognition
(ASR), text-to-speech (TTS) and machine translation (MT) cannot proceed
without these basics.
In the ANLoc project we created almost 100 locales, 12 keyboard layouts and
a font to cover all of the latin characters used in African languages. For a large
number of languages we can capture, see and store content – we applied first
aid for these languages. And it can be applied to any marginalised language
across the globe.
Empowered Communities
Marginalised languages often have limited resources, but one resource that
they do have is a community of speakers. For marginalised and under resourced
languages to prosper is really about empowering these communities because then
the community can take our work to new heights and in fact take over our work.
Within the scope of limited resources this often means that there are no funds
to pay contributors so there needs to be a body of committed volunteers.
But scarce resources also means that good skills are in limited supply. Thus
it is important that these scarce skills are used optimally. What that means
is that those skills are deployed to important tasks while volunteers assist in
other areas. Empowered communities in this case are assisting in optimising
resources allocation for the benefit of the language.
The following are examples that we have used to empower communities:
1. Translate@thons – Translate.org.za adopted this approach to
community translation for working on various pieces of software.
Google now uses a similar approach to use communities to translate
the Google interface.
2. Pootle – a web-based tool developed by Translate to allow easy
community participation in translation tasks. During the ANLoc
project seven teams translated Mozilla Firefox into African languages
using Pootle as their tool for translation. A number of open source and
commercial companies now use Pootle for community translation.
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