[Fsf-friends] Dwayne offers tips on getting started in localisation

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

Dwayne offers tips on getting started in localisation

By Frederick Noronha

Dwayne Bailey (34) lives in Pretoria and comes from Cape
Town, South Africa. In the world of Free Software and Open
Source, Dwayne is well known for preaching the localisation
gospel.

Says Dwayne: "Actually localisation is everything that makes
the computer work for you in your locale (country and
language). Translating the computer interfaces is by far the
biggest task and ongoing. But its not the complete picture. 
Keyboards, fonts, locales, date systems, rendering, bidi are
all part of localisation."

Dwayne has been involved with a major translation project in
South Africa. As he put it when we last spoke, "At
Translate.org.za we're localising Free and Open Source
Software into 11 South African languages. One is English,
it's quite an easy one (smiles). The others are Afrikaans,
Zulu, Xhosa, Venda, Tsonga, Tswana, Siswati, Northern Sotho,
Southern Sotho, Ndebele." [2]

But this time, at Africa Source 2, we focussed on another issue. 
What's the best route for a small-to-medium language to take, if it
wants to enter the world of computing? 

Says Dwayne: "What I'm discovering now is that the first
things to do (for any language) is to get in place the basic
infrastructure. One reason is so that they can start, the
other is so that they can write and do things in their
language."

Three things need to be checked, he explains. 

Firstly, whether you can type your language, and have a
keyboard to do so. Then, you need to be able to see the text,
so font-rendering is the issue here. The third important task
is to define a locale for language and country. 

(In simple language, this is a configuration file that
defines whether your language uses the metric or imperial
system, what are the names in your language for the days of
the weeks and months of the year, what calendar system do you
use, and so on...)

After this, what?

          Then, says Dwayne, you're really free to do
          translations. That's when you need to really start
          thinking about what you want to achieve. Even a
          small group can achieve change, he believes.

"The reason why you need to define goals is to ensure you
don't kid yourself about what you're doing. If you're
localising [GNU]Linux into Bulgarian, and you say this is
being done so that Bulgarians can use a computer in their
language, when in fact they all use Windows, then you need
objectives that are based in reality," he explains.

Your objectives could be anything. "I'm happy if someone says
I'm translating Thunderbird, the email client, into Afrikaans
for my 100 year old granny," jokes Dwayne, whose specs and
lean figure makes him look much more serious than he is.

The import thing is to understand what your goals are like.

"It's all about focus. Your objective helps to focus where
you put in your energies. In our organisation, we found we
were being pushed from pillar to post. Everyone wanted us to
translate something, and there was always a good reason," he
narrates.

But what works well for a small language?

"My feeling is that you have to translate stuff that focuses
on the end-user. And that narrows down your scope. End-users
are the people that are mostly going to benefit from whatever
you do," he stresses.

Dwayne also suggests that localisation teams look at
cross-platform tools, i.e. those that work on multiple
operating systems such as GNU/Linux, Windows or Apple Mac.
"Even within that, I would define (the more useful tools as)
a sub-set: anything to do with communication is probably the
most important thing to work on," he explains.

Has he emerged wiser from his experiences of past work? "If I
was going to do things again, I would prioritise it in the
following order: email client, instant messaging and a word
processor. When you look at (the whole of) Open Office, it's
a relatively large project. But you can (begin by)
translating only the word processor."

Can localisation in computing really make a difference to a
language's future?

Dwayne narrates the "interesting story" of the Venda
language, which has some 700,000 speakers. "We needed to
translate it. I found there were some extra characters needed
-- beyond the Latin characters. So I investigated how to make
a keyboard, and made it just for fun. I made some fonts."

One translator in the team was a linguist. He talked about
'mechanical imperialism', where the deficiencies of the
computer were changing the way people could write a language.
That is still a problem.

This worked itself out in odd ways: a professional translator
employed by the South African parliament to translate into
Venda, couldn't type all the characters needed. So they would
type things out, and then add the 'missing' characters by
hand. "Which is completely sad. Valuable information which
could be created for the language is completely lost. That's
a demonstration that simple things could do amazing things
for a language," says Dwayne. 

Isn't it sometimes an uneasy relationship between techies and
linguists, both of whom need a stable partnership to make a
translation project a success?

Says Dwayne: "Whereever there are issues about techies and
translators, the reality is that techies don't appreciate
translation. They appreciate translation when it looks good
in a press release; but in their behaviour there's not that
kind of care. But having said that, there are certain
projects where there's a growing respect for the localisers.
The key thing there is usually to have a representative for
the localisers (in tech teams). They often act as the
go-between."

Check the TranslateWiki [3], a great starting point for
localisation of your language. It offers links to: The
WordForge project; The Translate Toolkit (a toolkit to
convert between various different translation formats);
Pootle (a portal that will enable you to manage your
translation project, do web-based translation and offline
translation); the Localisation Guide (a guide to how to start
and run a localisation project) and a glossary of translation
terms.

Once programmers see localisers as valuable members of the
community and once localisers see responsive programmers both
sides begin to see a very healthy relationship, argues
Dwayne.  "Something that can take us onto 100 languages."

Here are some figures that remind us of how serious the task
is: There are about 239 languages in Africa with more than
one million speakers. Free/Libre and Open Source Software
covers about 50-60 languages in total. In Africa currently
covered are 10! Says Dwayne: "Localisation is a task that
many people can do and clearly we need lots more people to
contribute."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_localization
[2] http://www.tacticaltech.org/node/237
[3] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/

-- 
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Frederick 'FN' Noronha  | http://del.icio.us/fredericknoronha
Saligao, Goa, India     | fred at bytesforall.org
Independent Journalist  | +91(832)2409490 Cell 9822122436
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