The South African National Advisory Council on Innovation
(NACI)
recently
published a document
(pdf version)
with far reaching recommendations about open source and open standards.
The paper contains a narrative on the South African translation project
translate.org.za
Translate.org.za (partly sponsored by Obsidian Systems) is spearheading an effort to translate KDE -- the complete desktop including Konqueror, KMail, KWord, KSpread -- into the eleven official languages of South Africa. As a first start, the Xhosa translation is already part of KDE 2.2.1.
KDE.com has announced it will provide a convenient
service to all KDE developers who, for whatever reason, have not been able
to compile KDE documentation properly or who do not want to go through the
hassle of installing all of the necessary packages to compile KDE .dockbook
files. Simply visit the KDE.com
DocBook Documentation
The KDE Team needs your help with writing documentation for all of the great applications in KDE! This is your opportunity to help KDE become useful to the users of KDE applications at any level. You don't need to be a professional writer, and you don't even need to know everything about a program. For more information, please visit us at the Editorial Team website, or contact Mike McBride if you are interested.
The organization Norsk Målungdom, which works with promoting the Norwegian (Nynorsk) language, asks Norwegian schools to boycott Microsoft products and use KDE instead. MS Windows and Office only exist in the Norwegian (Bokmål) language, but Norwegian law states that pupils have the right to books and equipment in their own language.
So far, Microsoft has claimed that a translation to Nynorsk will be too expensive. Virtually all schools in Norway use MS software, and that means all applications are in Bokmål.
Eric Bischoff today filed a detailed report on the successful conclusion of "the first meeting of the KDE translation and documentation teams". Some excerpts from the report are included below.
As Eric explains:
The purpose
of the KDE Documentation and Localization Workshop was to give people
involved in KDE's documentation and translation an opportunity to:
Well, this is pretty cool. Bumchul Kim has updated his webpage with patches and details on what's needed to make KDE CVS and Qt 2.2.0 work well with the Korean charset. Includes cool screenshots and a patch for an OnTheSpot implementation in Qt.