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!