So much going on in OpenOffice.org land, so little time to blog. However, today is UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day, and a special day of celebration for OpenOffice.org’s Native Language Confederation. This worldwide team of (mostly volunteer) enthusiasts translates and provides support for OpenOffice.org in over 80 languages.

I really believe that this work more than any other will boost the take-up of OpenOffice.org around the world. OpenOffice.org 2 is a mature and fully-featured office suite. For most users, it more than meets their office software requirements. Obviously, the ongoing development effort is absolutely essential to maintain the quality of the product, but there can be very few people who are unable to use the software until some new feature is added.

However, on the language side, there are 6,000 languages which are not supported by office software. One example: just one translation – Bangla – has a potential to serve over 200 million Bangla speakers in their mother language. Languages are the real battleground for market share, and this is one reason why the OpenOffice.org Native Language Confederation is so important.

The other reason is of course one of social justice. Why should people be deprived of access to basic office software because they haven’t learned a foreign language first? Why should poets and writers be deprived of a word processor when writing in their mother language? Why should languages be downgraded simply because the people who use it are not numerous or rich enough to attract the interest of commercial software companies (“digitally endangered languages”)?

So, today, let’s celebrate the work of the OpenOffice.org Native Language Confederation as part of UNESCO’s International Mother Languages Day. Display our poster – and blog about it in your Mother Language (and yes, mine is English )

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 8:23 am and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.