The Department of Communications is tasked with communication related activities for governemnt. Including regulation, oversite of state owned communication enterprises and interests, amongst others.

In 2003 the department became a patron on Translate.org.za helping is get through a tough time in terms of funding and allowing us to complete our work on the Mozilla Suite.

In 2004, we completed an agreements that saw the CSIR managing, on behalf of the department, a 2 year engagement with Translate.org.za. During this relationship we:

• Localised OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird into the 11 official languages. Some of these where updates of our existing translations, but for the first time we could tackle all languages.
• Produced spell checkers in the 11 languages (some are very basic and need further work)
• Ran a number of Transalte@thons, engaging volunteer localisers from various universities
• Saw the release of the first office suite in a non-English official languages and saw the release of the same in all 11 languages