Dear Subscriber,
It has been a while
since we last updated
you with news of what we
have been up to. The
good news is that the
project has made huge
strides over the past
few months and we're
getting more and more
translations out to to
users. Here a short list
of the many things we
have achieved over the
last few months:
OpenOffice.org 2.0 in
all South African
languages
The open source office
suite OpenOffice.org 2.0
was finally released
last month, almost two
years after developers
started working on in.
The good news is that
Translate.org.za
completed work on the
translations ahead of
the global launch and we
were able to have seven
of South Africa's eleven
official languages
included in the first
release. The other four
languages (Venda, Swati,
Tswana and South African
English) will be
finalised in November
and will be done in time
for the release of
version 2.0.1
In preparation for the
launch of OpenOffice.org
2.0 we also released a
beta copy of the office
suite with all 11
languages including the
four languages still in
beta. We handed copies
of this out at a launch
on Heritage Day
(September 24) together
with the South African
Department of
Communications which
sponsors much of our
work. Read more here.
Venda keyboard ready to
go
One of the challenges
when dealing with
indigenous languages
that include characters
that aren't represented
by the more commonly
used keyboards is that
its speakers are unable
to type or view
documents in their
language. One such
language in South Africa
is Venda which has a
number of rare diacritic
- or accent - characters
not reproducible using
most standard fonts and
keyboards.
To overcome this problem
Translate.org.za has
developed a set of
keyboard overlays and
fonts to accurately
represent the Venda
characters as well as
other South African
languages. The keyboard
is designed to cover all
South African languages.
It includes mappings for
Venda, Tswana, Northern
Sotho and Afrikaans.
We have also released a
South African Keyboard
user's guide that can be
downloaded from here.
The Venda keyboard
stickers are available
from Translate.org.za.
Dictionaries
The Afrikaans and Zulu
dictionaries have
received a lot more
attention over the last
couple of months and
Friedel Wolff in
particular did a great
job of updating the
Afrikaans dictionary and
leading the efforts to
create hyphenation
dictionaries for
Afrikaans and Zulu.
More Mozilla
translations
We are also finishing up
translations for Firefox
and Thunderbird and
expect to have all 11
South African languages
ready by late November.
Dwayne Bailey
(012) 460 1095
info at translate.org.za
www.translate.org.za
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