I was pleased to see a posting that OpenOffice.org’s Finnish Native-Language Project had received a prestigious award for their work in translating OpenOffice.org.

The Native Language Confederation is one of the great success stories of OpenOffice.org. The last time I looked there were over fifty NL-Projects – about half of the languages with OpenOffice.org versions. What does the Confederation do? The amiable project lead, Charles Schulz, puts it like this:

(our) current mandate is to provide a community wherein those involved in furthering OpenOffice.org in all the world’s languages can share resources and information. It is important to note that NLC projects are language not region based. It’s equally important to note that we really enjoy what we are doing and think it really important.

Javier Sola’s talk at the OpenOffice.org Conference in 2005 about OpenOffice.org in Cambodia brought out just how important this work is. He talked about digitally endangered languages – languages used by people who are too few in number or too poor to make them attractive to commercial software developers. This means that native speakers of these languages end up having two barriers to climb to access computers – first, they have to learn English; then they have to learn IT skills. Their native language is marginalised, and becomes digitally endangered.

These are precisely the people that open-source projects like OpenOffice.org can help. The software can be translated by local volunteers, and can then be distributed free of charge through schools, government departments, NGOs, etc. As I noted previously, even the UK Government has recognised how important a step this can be in developing economies.

So congratulations all round to Charles and everyone who works in the NL Projects. Charles’ quiet diplomacy has steered the project around some major political hot potatoes such as languages versus countries and the naming of projects (people have gone to war over less). It’s a shame this work isn’t more widely recognised as a huge success for open-source – I can only assume it’s because so many pundits never look outside the English-speaking enclave. Open-source isn’t just about writing code – it’s also about making that code usable, and for many people, the first step is making it available in a language they understand.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2006 at 3:51 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.