June 23, 2007

Foo Camp: Making the web work for Africa

Martin Benjamin

Why Language Matters

  • Most tools are wrapped up in language - if you're trying to learn a tool that is wrapped in a different language, it will make the learning process extremely difficult.

Why African languages really matter

  • Tried to teach some people how to swim - if the teachers didn't use the students native tongue, the swimming lesson would have ended really quickly.
  • Language is the key to knowledge - for reading the news, doing your homework, browsing the web...
  • Knowledge is the key to prosperity - for getting a job, selling a product, buying a company
  • Very few Africans can access IT in languages with which they are comfortable
  • Local language IT - the killer app for technology uptake
  • IT master as a path to prosperity: it works in India (for those who speak english), it works for you. How do we make it work in Africa?

foocamp_kamusi_project.jpg
Martin Benjamin starting his talk

Swahili Overview:

  • 100 million speakers
  • About 1.5% of world's people
  • Most widely spoken African language

The Kamusi Project

  • Started as a participatory "living" project on Gopher in 1994
  • ~70,000 bilingual entries
  • 10M+ lookups
  • tens of thousands of users in Africa (wish it was more - making an SMS frontend could be huge)
  • Anyone can edit, but edits must be approved.
  • free to search, download, and print

PALDO - future of IT in Africa

  • Pan-African Living Dictionary Online
  • ~2000 languages in Africa
  • 20 language clusters (group of languages that are similar enough that people who know one can kindof/sortof grok another) account for about 85% of the African population, roughly 850M people
  • Make each language indexed to every other language - so you can go from any language to any other language
  • Start with 10,000 words in each language, based on popularity in Kamusi
  • Cross index by machine, later by humans as well
  • modular - more languages can be added
  • English as the lingua franca - basis of index and translation
  • omega wiki - closest project doing a similar thing; PALDO guys are working with them.
  • Yale currently holds copyright on the data, but has agreed to release it to a new home, which is yet to be decided.

PALDO and the future of IT in Africa

  • Localization (L10n) terminology from OpenOffice and other F/OSS projects to be included
  • PALDO will become a central repository of approaches to L10n
  • Future software/IT products will be localizable for African markets quickly and effectively
  • PALDO will play nicely with others - OLPC, OmegaWiki, translating software, etc.
  • With modest funding, specialized vocabularies can be added for many important communication domains, such as Health Care, Law, Business, Agriculture, Environment (conservation)

Needs:

  • Technology support - people to write code, admin, etc.
  • Funding - likely to get grant that will cover enough to get started

Posted by andyr at June 23, 2007 11:56 AM