At the close of SANGONeT's second annual ICTs for Civil Society conference on 3.9.06, Dwayne Bailey, a well known translator and IT activist, called on software developers worldwide to make greater efforts to localize their software for use in South Africa and other African countries. Bailey stated that translation of the software and documentation is not sufficient, due to more complex cultural issues at hand. One example: Ethiopia does not use the Gregorian calendar but rather the Julian calendar.
SANGONeT is an organization that provides ICT (information communication technology) services to South African non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
South Africa is one of most language-diverse countries in the world, and has 11 official languages: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Xhosa, Zulu, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Tswana, Swazi, Venda, Tsonga.
One major initiative that may help expedite African software localization efforts is the evolvement of Pootle (http://pootle.wordforge.org), an online translation and translation management system. This is a type of 'open-source' environment for translators and software localizers, and is intended to assist in the software localization process.
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