Around the world, more than 95% of the population are not native English speakers. English is learnt by about half of the world's population as their second language. From statistics, we know that more than half of the world’s population is more comfortable with not speaking English. For this reason, it is important that we develop solutions that are localized to as many as languages as possible to ensure that we cater for the better part of the audience who are not comfortable speaking English.
At African Maths Initiative (AMI), we believe that this is a practice that should be embraced by software and applications developers in order to get more market and audience for the solutions developed. In the latest project by AMI, the African Data Initiative, we have embraced this method of developing software that has translations capability to many languages.
Among the roles that I have in this project is to ensure that the new statistical package has multilingual capabilities. Within the last two Weeks I have managed to set up tools that will be used in the entire project in implementation of translations. I am using the Multilingual App Toolkit from Microsoft which is a free adon that integrates well with visual studio, the Integrated Development Environment we are using in development of the software.
Currently, we have implemented two languages, Kiswahili and French. Having that the actual development of the software was launched in Tanzania, and most people speak Kiswahili, it was our motivation to translate the software first in Kiswahili, a language spoken by over 100m people across the world. Having no funds to do this, we are still looking into ways that we could implement multilingual crowd-sourcing where we will have people of goodwill and volunteers help in translations to the languages they are most proficient in. We need this also because, the translations we have from the translation provider may not be as accurate as they should be since they are machine translations which are derived from Google Translate.
Apart
from this work on multilingual implementation, I also had a lecture at
African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Tanzania, where a colleague at work, John Lunalo and I delivered a
lecture on Open Data Kit, a free mobile data collection and management solution. This was an exciting opportunity to teach
among the top creams in Africa a new concept. It all went well. We
greatly appreciate the opportunity and the AIMS Tanzania administration
for granting us that
chance.
We look forward to incorporating more languages as we go by. It is in
our objectives to make sure everyone around the world will be able to
use our new statistical software with the language the understand best.
this will in turn improve understanding, learning and teaching of
statistics.
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