21 October 2005

All South Africans will soon have the choice of using their computers in their home language, thanks to the work of non-profit organisation Translate.org.za.

The latest release of OpenOffice.org 2, the open source productivity suite, includes support for seven of South Africa's 11 official languages, with the rest to be supported by the end of 2005.

The release on Thursday of the popular OpenOffice.org word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation software includes support for 36 languages across the world.

Localisation
The office suite is already available in Afrikaans, isiZulu, Sepedi, isiXhosa, seSotho and isiNdebele, as well as a South African English localisation.

Translations for South Africa's four other official languages are well under way, with releases planned for November, Translate director Dwayne Bailey told Tectonic.co.za.

The decentralised and open nature of open source software means that users are free to translate the programmes themselves.

Translate.org.za has also translated other open source projects, such as the Mozilla Firefox browser, for South African languages.

Community effort
The office suite is a community effort between Sun Microsystems, Intel, Red Hat, many linux distributions and thousands of independent contributers.

"OpenOffice.org is on a path toward being the most popular office suite the world has ever seen," Sun CEO Johnathan Schwartz said at the launch. "[It provides] users with safety, choice, and an opportunity to participate in one of the broadest community efforts the internet has ever seen."

The suite uses the OASIS OpenDocument format, widely expected to become an International Standards Organisation (ISO) accepted standard for electronic documents.

OpenOffice.org includes, for the first time, a desktop database application as well as the standard office suite offerings.

OpenOffice.org is available for all operating systems, and is available as a free download. The South African language translations can be found on Translate.org.za.

SouthAfrica.info reporter

	Education and outreach programmes help to narrow the digital divide (Image: Gauteng Online)

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