A broad overview of localisation progress in Africa, focusing on the history and progress made so far. Looking at the contribution of open source, Microsoft, Google and other players over the years. The aim of the talk was to inform attendees to the ICANN International Domain Name workshop on the area of localisation. As well as to highlight how IDNs are part of the area of enabling localisation.

1. Localisation in Africa
Dwayne Bailey, Translate

2. Speak to a person in a language that they
understand and you speak to their head.
Speak in their language and you speak
to their heart.
Nelson Mandela

3. Localising Firefox.
Helping, first South Africa, then Africa
Now the world

4. What we do
Strategy – helping governments and
organisations build localisation strategies
Enabling localisation – can you type and see
the web
Tools – building simple localisation tools for
communities with low skills and poor
connectivity
Training – increasing localisation skills

5. How we go about it
We help organisations to localise their software
using community resources.
We build software such as Pootle, and share
our skills and experience that make this
possible.
We’re helping Mozilla, LibreOffice and others to
grow their long tail localisations.

6. Community of
One
helping lots of small communities
make a big difference

7. Back localisation - Tools
Pootle – online translation. Used to localise +50%
of Firefox localisations.
Virtaal – desktop translation tool for the majority of
the world that has very poor connectivity
Translate Toolkit – localisation engineers swiss
army knife
AmaGama – very large open source translation
memory

8. Looking at Africa
Unless a language is active in the intellectual
domains of the day, it is a dead language
Neville Alexander

9. Where have we come from
✔Missionaries transcribing
✔Inventors of scripts and orthographies
✔Often rich publishing histories

10. Generations of localisation
✔ 80s - 8 bit encoding. Ironically an age of
innovation, N’ko custom layout software
✔ 90s - Windows 95, seems like we forgot how to
localise
✔ 00s - open source communities, Microsoft LLP.
Cost isn’t all of it.
✔ 10s - phones and mobile. Twitter, Facebook
and a real age of communities. But maybe a
loss in terms of ownership and influence

11. The areas of localisation
•Enabling technology
• Encoding, Font, keyboard, locales and I’ll
include IDNs
•Localization/Translation
•Resource creation
•Support services
• Machine Translation, Spell checkers

12. Why are IDNs critical?
The feeling of belonging
Mechanical imperialism

13. African Network for
Localisation (Anloc)
●
Worked to create a list of characters needed
for Latin-based African languages
●
Made various keyboard layouts
●
Built free localisation tools
●
Provided training across the continent
●
Built terminology for the ICT domain

14. How are things looking in
Africa
From almost nothing
Enabling technology in a good state for consumption
Active localisation of Microsoft products
Google is an active localiser starting with their four
core languages and now moving on.
Machine translation (however bad you think it is) in a
number of languages
Firefox and Firefox OS - growing number of languages
in Southern Africa and West Africa.

15. Where are we headed
We shouldn’t be worried about IDN use right now but
rather ensuring future use.
Use soon that will be critical as without IDNs we won’t be
able to make domains that are properly reflective.
We have issues of local language literacy now.
But if we can’t type names correctly now then solving it
later will be problematic
We already have poor data for Venda and Yoruba
because people don’t use diacritics because their
software failed them

16. Call to arms
IDNs aren’t going to help people type
They aren’t going to create new content
But they are going to eliminate a barrier that
prevents the internet just feeling like its
always been a home for African languages
We have an opportunity now to change that
before its too late.