28 July 2008
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 Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, co-ordinates the development of popular internet software projects such as the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird e-mail client.
Translate.org.za said in a statement this week that the grant would enable it to further its work on web-based translation tool Pootle, the Translate Toolkit, as well as a still-to-be-released offline translation tool.
“The grant from Mozilla not only helps us to carry on with our work on Pootle and the Translate Toolkit, but is also a fantastic recognition of the work that Translate.org.za has done,” said Translate.org.za’s Friedel Wolff, adding that the organisation was extremely pleased to be recognised by Mozilla for its localisation work.
“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.”
Open source tools
Translate.org.za’s translation tools are already widely used in the open source community, and Pootle is used by projects such OpenOffice.org, the One Laptop Per Child project, Creative Commons and OpenSolaris.
“Our translation tools are also in use by quite a few Mozilla localisation teams globally,” said Wolff.
The grant from Mozilla will provide Translate.org.za with 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,” he said. “We want to limit the amount of technical knowledge users need to use the tools so that they can be used by more users.”
Other goals for the tools include simplifying management of translations and making it easier to monitor the quality of translations.
Project progress and further information is available on the project website.
SAinfo reporter
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