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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:
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 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.
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Dwayne Bailey
 (012) 460 1095
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www.translate.org.za
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