South Africa's award-winning multilingual software developer, Translate.org.za, has been awarded a grant by the Mozilla Corporation to extend its translation tools.
The US-based corporation, that co-ordinates Internet software projects such as the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client, has granted Translate.org.za US$70 000 (R518 000) worth of funding to help the local organisation further their latest projects; the Translate Toolkit and Pootle.
The Translate Toolkit allows software translators to produce their own high quality localisations in a single format. Pootle, based on the toolkit, is a user friendly web-based translation tool that allows for online translation and easy volunteer contribution.
Translate.org.za's Friedel Wolff said the organisation is extremely pleased about receiving the grant. It is also great recognition for the work they are doing. "The grant from Mozilla is based on the strength of the work that we have done in the past and the tools that we have released to users," he said.
Seth Bindernagel, head of Mozilla's Community Giving Programme, says, "We [awarded the grant] because Mozilla and Translate's missions are very well aligned, as both organizations are motivated by promoting openness and opportunity on the Internet."
"We hope that our support will help amplify the impact they are having in so many translation communities," he adds.
According to Translate.org.za, the grant will provide the company with the financial backing to extend the capabilities of the Toolkit and Pootle, including making the tools more accessible and easier to use.
"One of our objectives with the grant is to make the tools more accessible to users," says Wolff.
"We want to limit the amount of technical knowledge users need to use the tools so that they can be used by more users."
Translate.org.za was established in 2001 with the aim of developing free and open source software in the 11 official languages of South Africa. It has since won a number of awards for bridging the digital divide and furthering multilingualism in the country.
Among their successful projects is the South African Keyboard which was developed to accommodate the unique characters of Afrikaans, Northern Sotho, Tswana and Venda for work on the Windows sytem. The company has also localized Mozilla's Firefox browser and Thunderbird into all 11 South African languages.
Globally Translate.org.za's tools are widely used in the open source community in projects such as OpenOffice.org, the One Laptop Per Child project, Creative Commons and OpenSolaris.
