On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, Mark Williamson wrote:
I am guessing that at least a couple of those who attended the conference were native or fluent speakers of some of South Africa's _other_ official languages.
Afrikaans only.
Do these people know that we have Wikipedias in their mother tongue?
Since Angela contacted them by posting on their Talk pages, yes.
It seems to me that African-language localisation is an important part of open-content and open-source in South Africa (see translate.co.za ), yet very few of these people seem to know about these Wikipedias.
Knowing a Xhosa man in the IT profession, I asked him about the KDE menus in Xhosa. He said he found them confusing - when programming, using Email, every day interactions, he uses English. It actually slows him down to flip to Xhosa.
My french is quite passable. After staying in France for a while, I find myself thinking in French. It becomes quicker than thinking in English and translating everything.
Not saying it isn't a worthy goal to do the translation, particularly for people who are just starting with computers.
Cheers, Andy!