translate.org.za wins multi-lingualism prize

06 Feb 2008

I was happy to hear that Translate.org.za has, very deservedly, won an award given by the Pan South African Language Board - for their contribution to multilingualism.

It's too easy for people - especially developers - to judge the state of South Africa's contribution to the Free Software movement in terms of code - projects such as OpenLab, Chisimba, and KnowledgeTree made primarily by South African (and African) developers.  However, Translate.org.za is probably better known than all of these.

Not that Translate.org.za hasn't delivered code - Pootle is one of the two main translation tools used for Free Software projects, and is the one that itself is Free Sofware.  (I keep on meaning to download the latest code and see what I can help out on.  I'm useless, I know.)

I first heard about Translate.org.za from its founder, Dwayne Bailey, while he was first starting work on it while managing the Cape Town office of South African Linux go-to guys Obsidian.  Since then, I've been bumping into Dwayne every few months around South Africa and other bits of Africa (at least Uganda and Namibia, and possibly Kenya too) when he's been doing advocacy and education around localisation, translation, and related topics.  Of course, he's been a lot further afield than that.

Anyway, for all my jadedness about the Free Software situation in South African and Africa, this reminded me about Translate.org.za and that good things are still happening.

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Hi, I'm Neil Blakey-Milner, a technology generalist most interested by open source, security, and building scalable systems (especially if I get to use the Python programming language).

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