Developing open source
Published: 16 Feb 2004 14:05 GMT
Many of those languages are unlikely to merit the attention of commercial software makers for the foreseeable future, so open-source projects are the only way to produce applications ordinary people can use. Murphy said the Rwanda project has about 20 contributors, mostly college students who can use English-language applications but want something in the native tongue to benefit the rest of the country.
"With only one country in the world speaking this language... and with 90 percent of the population not even having access to electricity, I highly doubt that there is anything even close to a monetary incentive to translate any Microsoft utility to Kinyarwanda," Murphy said. "For this project, the motivation is not monetary. The motivation is patriotic. Computer technology is seen as at least one possible route to lead the country out of poverty... Our translators aren't doing it for themselves; they are doing it to open computers to their little brothers and sisters, their parents and relatives."
Localisation projects are no trivial undertaking. OpenOffice has 20,000 strings of text -- everything from dialogue boxes to help libraries -- all of which have to be translated into the new language. Support for non-English characters and accent marks requires further work, as does creation of a spell-check dictionary and tweaking the user interface. Just finding everything that has to be translated can be a daunting task.
Murphy said he's still working on building tools to extract the text strings that need to be translated. "The OpenOffice folks don't do it for anyone, so this is some sort of gauntlet we are expected to pass through," he said.
OpenOffice.org marketing guru Sam Hiser said that although the main OpenOffice development effort has done a good job of building in support for alternate character sets, right-to-left text and other mechanical issues, much more needs to be done to aid localisation efforts. "The instructions are abysmally unclear," he said. "It's not so hard for the technically literate. You write a program and it spits out these 20,000 strings -- for technical people, it's not a big deal. But the documentation is pretty lame as it addresses non-computer-literate people."
Microsoft looks ahead
When it comes to open source in the developing world, there are potential benefits besides language, and even countries that can get proprietary software in their own tongue are looking elsewhere.
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