Friedel en ander frappanthede

As part of my visit to the Centre for Next Generation Localisation I talked today to a group about ANLoc and about the software for localisation that we develop at Translate.org.za. It's been a long while since I had a group of people listening that attentively to me for more than two hours.

It was great to be able to talk in detail about ANLoc and each sub-project. Naoto Nishio was especially interested in policy issues. Interestingly, he mentions that Japan doesn't have a language policy. It was also nice to have Asanka Wasala from Sri Lanka there who was part of the Pan Localisation group — ANLoc's sister group in Asia.

After that I could talk in detail about Pootle and Virtaal. It was really nice to start off knowing that most people in the room already knew about Pootle and Virtaal, and that some of them already use it in some of the courses that they teach. Before and afterwards I talked to some people about trust, ranking and measuring quality when translation crowd-sourcing is used. Dimitra Anastasiou asked about how to incorporate a new machine translation engine in Virtaal.

It was really nice to be able to represent ANLoc and Free and Open Source software here.