Localisation

These days the usual talk is about the economy. And it's a gloomy talk. Now, I cannot stop thinking that economy is mostly like the weather, as both are chaotic systems that make predictions an extremely difficult task. The main difference is that clouds don't read the met, while we actually do. So when the met says "a hard rain is gonna fall" us clouds may well end up believing it... Anyway, nothing is 100% nice or bad, not even a recession.

These days there is a huge number of requests for closure of wikipedias in African Languages. The issue is controversial as obviously one can look at them from a number of conflicting points of view. From one end you can pretty much say these requests are discriminatory in nature, as they tend to ignore the potential amount of public for information published in such languages and they deliberately ignore the objective problems (low alphabetization, lack of connectivity, to name but the first that come to mind) that slow down the production rate for such projects. On the other end, there is a number of practical problems associated with the management of an empty project, as spammers do not know linguistic boundaries and must be dealt with no matter if you have users for a project or not.

In this book we will collect translation memories and glossaries which were created for the translation of our contents. Most translations are being now carried out by using Anaphraseus, a CAT-Tool which allows for the use of ISO 639-3 codes for the translation memory. Please also note that the source texts or target texts may have changed after the actual translation. This means: changes and improvements can occur anytime so that the provided translation memory or also the terminology used in the glossaries could be different.

Well being one of the initiators of OmegaWiki I think it is time to start writing down how everything started, integrating step by step our adventure in the world of words and dictionaries.

I'd like to dedicate this book to some very special people, those who in some way changed and are changing my life and therefore they will be mentioned only when things are ready.

Betawiki is the site on which most of the mediawiki software localization is dealt with. It was born mainly to localize mediawiki, but lately it has started to be seen as a valuable resource for other Open Source Projects. This eventually led to manage the localization of a free Colonization clone called Freecol on the same site.