PRESS RELEASE, d.d. 07-06-2007 (EMBARGO: publication not before 08-06-2007)
OpenTaal (www.opentaal.org)
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OPEN SOURCE SPELL CHECKING WORD LIST RECEIVES BLESSING FROM DUTCH
LANGUAGE UNION
Today (June 8th) the Dutch-speaking OpenTaal project (translation: "Open
Language") publishes its word list that received the Spelling Seal of
Approval from the Dutch Language Union, the formal Dutch language
institute. The Seal of Approval indicates that the word list complies
with the Dutch official spelling. "It is of great importance that we
received the Spelling Seal of Approval. It assures users of open source
software that they can trust their Dutch spell checker", according to
Simon Brouwer, project leader of OpenTaal.
Since the end of 2005 the project OpenTaal has worked to improve and
extend an existing open source Dutch word list. The approved word list
contains more than 140.000 keywords. The word list is available in
packages that can be installed in OpenOffice.org, Firefox and
Thunderbird. The approved word list is available under a free license
(LGPL) and may be used by open source projects.
More than 10 Dutch and Belgian volunteers, some of them linguists, are
working together in the project. The aim of the project is the
development of free Dutch language files that can be used by free and
open source software projects. OpenTaal also works on a thesaurus and on
grammar checking. Anyone who wants to contribute to the goals of the
project is welcome to participate.
Background:
At the end of 2005 the Dutch Language Union published a new version of
its Dutch Language Word List (also known as the "Green Booklet"). Its
spelling rules are compulsory for government and education in the Dutch
language area from August 2006. For this reason, the existing open
source word list had to be updated. Also, the possibility arose to have
the language files certified by the Dutch Language Union. The OpenTaal
project has been founded to facilitate the collaboration of Dutch open
source projects on this subject.
The project started as an initiative of the government ICTU-programme
OSOSS. From the beginning, members of the Dutch TeX Usergroup and of
nl.OpenOffice.org were involved. In the meantime, other Dutch branches
of open source projects have started to participate. nl.Debian,
GNOME-NL, KDE.NL, Mozilla-nl are newly welcomed partner projects. The
project also has a good relation with the NLnet foundation that has
supported the project.
Sources:
OpenTaal - http://www.opentaal.org/english.php
Dutch Language Union (translation: Nederlandse Taalunie) -
http://taalunieversum.org/en/
Spelling Seal of Approval (translation: Keurmerk Spelling) -
http://taalunieversum.org/spelling/keurmerk/
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MEDIA INFORMATION
OpenTaal (www.opentaal.org)
Contact person: Bart Knubben ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) or Simon Brouwer
([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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Vriendelijke groet,
Simon Brouwer.
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