Begin forwarded message:
From: Bildad Kagai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: March 22, 2004 12:05:50 PM GMT+03:00
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Subject: [kenyalinux] Fwd: [council] Namibian OSS Workshop Produces Kiswahili Dictionary
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From: Bildad Kagai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: March 22, 2004 11:51:32 AM GMT+03:00
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [council] Namibian OSS Workshop Produces Kiswahili Dictionary
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Namibian OSS workshop produces Kiswahili dictionary
Alastair Otter
March 19 2004 - Kiswahili speakers can now spellcheck documents in their own
language. A group of developers taking part in the Africa Source joined
forces - and resources - to develop the first-ever Kiswahili dictionary. The
project, led by Jason Githeko of Kenya and Translate.org.za's Dwayne Bailey
produced the new dictionary in one of the training sessions during the
conference.
The five day Africa Source conference, organised by Amsterdam-based NGO
Tactical Technology Collective, has brought together a group of 60 of the
best African open source developers from across the continent. More than 25
countries, including Benin, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and
Zimbabwe, are represented at the workshop which is hoping to develop and
improve relations between OSS developers on the continent.
According to Bailey, the inspiration for the Kiswahili dictionary came from
Jason Githeko who approached him during the five-day workshop with a word
list of more than 50 000 words. Translate.org.za has over the past few years
translated a range of open source software - including Mozilla and KDE - into
local South African Languages as well as creating dictionaries and
spellcheckers for the OpenOffice.org application. In January the
Translate.org.za team announced the release of an Afrikaans spellchecker.
Bailey says, however, that the organisation has not previously worked wih
languages from outside of Africa.
Githeko says that he has been working towards creating a Kiswahili dictionary
for more than five years. He says that when he started the project to create
the dictionary in the late 1990s he approached Microsoft with the idea. The
problem, he says, is that there wasn't a language id in the Microsoft system
for Kiswahili and he ended up at a dead end. He continued to collect
Kiswahili words, however, with a view to finding another avenue for creating
a localised dictionary.
It wasn't until he met Bailey in Cape Town earlier this year and learned of
the Translate.org.za project that he felt that there was a possibility that
he could use the wordlist he had accumulated to build the dictionary he was
looking for.
During a series of workshops and a skills sharing session at the Africa
Source gathering, Githeko and Bailey worked on cleaning up the wordlist and
preparing it to create the Kiswahili dictionary. During one of the mid-week
sessions the final dictionary was created and released to the world of
OpenOffice.org users.
Githeko says he is extremely pleased to have a working Kiswahili dictionary
even if it is a little rough at present. "I have been working on this project
for more than five years. And in the end creating the spellchecker took only
a day."
For more on the Kiswahili dictionary visit www.translate.org.za or
http://translate.sourceforge.net.
Download the dictionary from:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/translate/sw_KE.zip?download.
Instructions on installing the dicionary can be found at:
http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/manual_instal.html
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