Thursday, January 27, 2005

Getting Horde Translated

For a while now, I've been interested in getting the Horde framework and in particular IMP translated into South African languages.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Horde/IMP is a widely used and very popular web-based e-mail client. A quick Google search reveals over 900 hits within South Africa, including Rhodes, Stellenbosch University, University of Pretoria and several corporates.

The need is clearly there. At Rhodes we try and encourage our ground and cleaning staff to become familiar with e-mail, for example. It'd be really useful if the e-mail client we gave them was in their first language, which is usually Xhosa. There are also quite a few first language Afrikaans speakers here, so having the three languages of the province available would be a big plus. The same applies to many of the local schools in Grahamstown.

There have been some massive strides towards internationalization recently. Google now speaks Afrikaans and Xhosa, as does Firefox and Open Office. The latter two are a result of the translate.org.za project.

This gave me an idea and so I've just e-mailed translate.org.za to see if they'll consider including Horde in their list of projects. Being PO-based application it fits right into what translate.org.za are doing with Pootle.

Since I'm in the unfortunate position that I don't speak either Xhosa or Afrikaans I feel somewhat dis-empowered. I see the potential of this, but I can actively do anything to make it happen. So this is what I'm looking for &mdash first language Xhosa and Afrikaans speakers who speak English, understand enough about e-mail and would be willing to donate some time to translating bits of Horde. This could happen either through Pootle (if translate.org.za show some interest) or via some equivalent that I set up (if they don't). If there is anyone at Rhodes who fits this bill (or anyone outside who doesn't mind helping out), please give me a shout.

We will, of course, contribute any language files we develop back to the Horde project so that others may benefit from them ... If we get to that stage.

posted by guy at: 15:37 SAST | path: /issues | permanent link