Translate.org.za - Will you translate my favourite products Foobar into Pig Latin?

Will you translate my favourite products Foobar into Pig Latin?

You have a program, you think of how useful it is to you and you wonder how much more useful it would be if everyone in South Africa could use it. So you ask Translate.org.za if they will translate it, seen as that is what we do. We say no, and now you are upset. Don't they care? They say they do 11 official languages and they care about languages....

So how exactly does Translate.org.za choose which software to translate?

We have experienced this problem before ~ a number of times. Now we have three golden rules ...

End-user focused
Cross-platform
Open Source

Which means?

End-user focused

We translate software that is used by the majority of end-user computers. Emailing, word processing, web browsing, etc. The login being that the people who most need software in another language will be using computers in the same way that English speaking end-users do.

Therefore we are not that concerned about command line tools, programming IDEs or simple text editors. As this is usually the land of the computer literate who are usually also English literate.

Cross-platform

Which means the application runs on a number of operating systems: Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. But of course with Windows and Linux being the most important. There are some very good Windows only products, but we choose not to lock people into a particular desktop. The last thing we want is to see our localisation effort result in less choice.

Choice drives down prices. Choice creates local and deep programming skills. Choice makes sure that proprietary vendors actually translate software into our languages.

Thus we choose appliations such as OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird because they run on Linux , Windows and many other applications.

Open Source

When we translate we are creating value. We want that value to remain available for many people to reuse, repurpose and resell. When you make something closed source you lock all that value into your product. Sure, it might make you a buck. Yes, you can say you care about African languages. But unless you release them to empower African languages, you are really doing very little to improve the status of African language.

Being Open Source has some practical outworkings. Our translations are used by a number of people in schools and business. The translations are incldued in various Linux distribiutions. They are used as the basis for spell checkers. And hopefully, they create a community that begins to care for their own languages instead of hoping that someone will take care of it for them.

I meet all the criteria. Now will you translate Foobar?

Translate is setup as a non-profit organisation, we hire translators from time to time to translate software for us. You are more then welcome to pay us to translate the software. But we really care about creating a community of localisers - people who come together and use the facilities and resources of Translate.org.za to enable translation, but do it free of charge as a part of the broader community. Now the question is ... will you translate Foobar?

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