Localise!

The localisation of OpenOffice.org into the Georgian language is
to be completed this summer. It marks part of an important process
taking place in Georgia, a former Soviet republic. A year ago the
ministry of education decided to rely on open source software in its
multimillion-dollar school computerisation project Deer Leap because delivering software in Georgian was only possible if
open source was chosen; Microsoft’s local partner had just announced
another delay in releasing Georgian Windows.

A small but dedicated Linux promotion group called Open
Consultants took the lead in coordinating the localisation process by
collaborating with local Linux community. A localisation camp
organised last summer gave enough impetus to the community to
complete Georgian KDE. A camp planned for early August this year
should result in a full Georgian OpenOffice.org.

By September the number of schools equipped with computers will
reach 600 (out of 2,300 in the country). The 7,750 machines they
employ will run on Deer Leap Linux, which is a local version of
Fedora. Other software on these machines will include
Georgian-language Firefox, Thunderbird, KDE Edutainmant, and, soon,
OpenOffice.org.

These developments demonstrate the potential of FOSS to provide
software in a local language, which is one of its key advantages.

Today, approximately 32% of world population or 1.8bn people
cannot use a computer in their own language if they rely on Microsoft
products — a figure I derive from looking at a
list of the languages in which Windows XP is available and data
on the spread of world languages. These people speak both languages
with large numbers of speakers, such as Bengali (196 million),
Javanese (76 million), and Persian (66 million), and languages whose
speakers number in the thousands rather than millions. Clearly, none
of them has been tempting enough for Microsoft to localise its
products so far, and some may never be, as in addition to offering
low numbers of potential customers, they often are spoken by poor or
minority people.

Localised FOSS is the best option for computing without relying on
a foreign language. Localisation is a serious issue for many
non-English-speakers. Why is this issue not especially prominent in
discussions concerning FOSS? Perhaps because these discussions are
dominated by people who do not suffer from this problem, as either
they enjoy the availability of the software they need in their own
language, or they have gone through the pain of learning to compute
in a foreign language, often also learning the language itself. Those
who stand to benefit from localised language versions of FOSS most
(those less educated, children) do not participate in the
discussions, as they either don’t speak foreign languages or, quite
obviously, cannot use a computer.

Clearly, the situation is not static, and Microsoft does release
new language versions of its products at times, but one should not
assume that a single company can cater for the needs of a world where
6,912
languages are spoken.

Localisation groups: remember Georgia and think big.
Policy-makers: have as much courage as the Georgians have had.
Funders: keep the above numbers in mind, think of other countries
like Georgia and support localisation efforts there. The localisation
potential of FOSS is yet to be fully explored.

Languages Windows XP is available in	Millions of speakers
Arabic	206
Basque	1
Bulgarian	7.5
Catalan	6.7
Chinese	1080
Croatian	6.2
Czech	12
Danish	5.3
Dutch	22
English	340
Estonian	1
Finnish	5.4
French	67
Gaelic	0.25
Galician	3.2
German	102
Greek	12
Gujarati	46
Hebrew	5.1
Hindi	370
Hungarian	15
Icelandic	0.3
Indonesian	23
Italian	61
Japanese	126
Kannada	35
Korean	71
Latvian	1.5
Lithuanian	3.1
Marathi	68
Norwegian (Bokmal and Nynorsk)	4.6
Polish	46
Portuguese	203
Punbjabi	61.5
Romanian	25
Russian	145
Serbian	11
Slovak	5
Slovenian	2.2
Spanish	350
Swedish	8.8
Tamil	68
Telugu	70
Thai	31
Turkish	60
Ukrainian	39
Vietnamese	70
Welsh	0.6
Total number of people with Windows XP available in their mother tongue	3903.05 (68%)
Total world population mid-2004	5723.86
Total number of people without Windows XP available in their mother tongue	1820.81 (32%)