I had a privilege of working on about three localization projects. And I have always assumed its easy and that every Tanzanian, or rather Swahili speaker will love to see the language going some where. But I was shocked.
As some of you know I am a Linux fan, and started the
tzLUG a few years back. We have continued the worked that was started by the
Kilinux group of localizing
Firefox in a community style. Just from this experience, I learned that if there is no direct gain, monetary, to an individual no one wants to volunteer.
And for a while I though okay, this is just one project, then I joined hands with the CEO of the
Kamusi Project, Martin Benjamin for two projects:
locales and
terminology project, sponsored by
ANLoc. These were even worse. We stayed in Tanzania for two weeks and only managed to come up with only 8 locales for the so many languages we have in Tanzania. Everyone we asked, also asked if there money to it. I remember one old man we had asked to assist us the locale for Kimachame said, "Kina watu wamesomea hii kazi bwana, watafute wao waifanye". I then I realize that the problem was
mind set. Its always someone else that has to do it,
not me.
Now, I understand times are tough, but can we do something because its right. Just a group of less that 10 Linux Users we managed to finish raw translation of 2500 strictly IT terms, in a space of two weeks. Can you imagine what 100 of us can do. The other thing is we are not constructive at our criticism. Some one will look at the work we have done and say this is poor, but can you help us make it better then. I understand we not language majors, but if we start someone else will have a much simpler task of perfecting what we would have done.
I currently working on another project, of
generation of local content for [ame="http://sw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mwanzo"]Wikipedia[/ame]. I have decided to look at involving even high school students this time. Please if you are interested please drop and
email. We are looking at raising the bar by at least 30% of the Swahili content on [ame="http://sw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mwanzo"]Wikipedia[/ame]. This project is sponsored by Google Africa. Also the process of quality checking the 2500 IT terms is still continuing your help will be greatly appreciated.
Instead of saying the TUKI and BAKITA will do it, lets do it and they will just quality assure what we would have do. Sorry for the long post.