"Local" heroes

Open source's local heroes
December 4, 2003, The Economist
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2246308

Software: If the commercial sort does not speak your
language, open-source software may well do so
instead

ITS POPULARITY is growing around the world, but open-
source software has particular appeal in developing
countries. In China, South Korea, India, Brazil and
other countries, governments are promoting the use of
such software which, unlike the proprietary kind, allows
users to inspect, modify and freely redistribute its
underlying programming instructions. The open-source
approach has a number of attractions. Adopting open-
source software can reduce costs, allay security
concerns and ensure there is no danger of becoming too
dependent on a foreign supplier. But there is another
benefit, too: because it can be freely modified, open-
source software is also easier to translate, or
localise, for use in a particular language. This
involves translating the menus, dialogue boxes, help
files, templates and message strings to create a new
version of the software.

Large software vendors have little incentive to support
any but the most widely spoken languages. Microsoft, for
example, provides its Windows 2000 operating system in
24 languages, and Windows XP in 33. The company also
supports over 20 languages in the latest version of its
Office software suite. Yet for many languages,
commercial vendors conclude that producing a localised
product is not economically viable.

The programmers who produce open-source software operate
by different rules, however. The leading desktop
interfaces for the open-source Linux operating system-
KDE and GNOME-are, between them, available in more than
twice as many languages as Windows. KDE has already been
localised for 42 languages, with a further 46 in the
pipeline. Similarly, Mozilla, an open-source web
browser, now speaks 65 languages, with 34 more to
follow. OpenOffice, the leading open-source office
suite, is available in 31 languages, including
Slovenian, Basque and Galician, and Indian languages
such as Gujarati, Devanagari, Kannada and Malayalam. And
another 44 languages including Icelandic, Lao, Latvian,
Welsh and Yiddish are on the way.

Localising software is a tedious job, but some people
are passionate enough about it to resort to unusual
measures. The Hungarian translation of OpenOffice was
going too slowly for Janos Noll, founder of the
Hungarian Foundation for Free Software. So he built some
web-based tools to distribute the workload and threw a
pizza party in the computer room at the Technical
University of Budapest. Over a dozen people worked
locally, with about 100 Hungarians submitting work
remotely over the web. Most of the work-translating over
21,000 text strings-was completed in three days.

Dwayne Bailey of translate.org.za, an open-source
translation project based in South Africa, says
localising open-source programs into Zulu, Xhosa, Venda,
Sesotho and other African languages makes computers more
accessible. With translated software, 'these languages
are suddenly players in the modern world.' Neville
Alexander, a former South African freedom-fighter,
agrees. 'An English-only or even an English-mainly
policy necessarily condemns most people, and thus the
country as a whole, to a permanent state of mediocrity,
since people are unable to be spontaneous, creative and
self-confident if they cannot use their first language,'
he says.
AP

Open source opens doors

A similar approach is being taken in India, where there
are 18 official languages and over 1,000 regional
dialects. Shikha Pillai is one of the leaders of a team
in Bangalore that is translating open-source software,
including OpenOffice, into ten Indian dialects. She,
too, feels that introducing Indian languages will help
to foster a far deeper penetration of information
technology. 'Localisation makes IT accessible to common
people,' she says. 'And Indian-language enabled software
could revolutionise the way our communications work;
even the way computers are used in India.'

In May, Thailand's government launched a subsidised
'people's PC' that runs LinuxTLE, a Thai-language
version of Linux. In September, Japan said it would join
a project established by China and South Korea to
develop localised, open-source alternatives to
Microsoft's software. Computer users around the world
are discovering that open-source software speaks their
language.