Open source's local heroes

Dec 4th 2003, The Economist


Software: If the commercial sort does not speak your language, open-source software may well do so instead
ITS POPULARITY is growing around the world, but open-source software has particular appeal in developing countries. In China, South Korea, India, Brazil and other countries, governments are promoting the use of such software which, unlike the proprietary kind, allows users to inspect, modify and freely redistribute its underlying programming instructions. The open-source approach has a number of attractions. Adopting open-source software can reduce costs, allay security concerns and ensure there is no danger of becoming too dependent on a foreign supplier. But there is another benefit, too: because it can be freely modified, open-source software is also easier to translate, or localise, for use in a particular language. This involves translating the menus, dialogue boxes, help files, templates and message strings to create a new version of the software.

Large software vendors have little incentive to support any but the most widely spoken languages. Microsoft, for example, provides its Windows 2000 operating system in 24 languages, and Windows XP in 33. The company also supports over 20 languages in the latest version of its Office software suite. Yet for many languages, commercial vendors conclude that producing a localised product is not economically viable.

The programmers who produce open-source software operate by different rules, however. The leading desktop interfaces for the open-source Linux operating system—KDE and GNOME—are, between them, available in more than twice as many languages as Windows. KDE has already been localised for 42 languages, with a further 46 in the pipeline. Similarly, Mozilla, an open-source web browser, now speaks 65 languages, with 34 more to follow. OpenOffice, the leading open-source office suite, is available in 31 languages, including Slovenian, Basque and Galician, and Indian languages such as Gujarati, Devanagari, Kannada and Malayalam. And another 44 languages including Icelandic, Lao, Latvian, Welsh and Yiddish are on the way.

Localising software is a tedious job, but some people are passionate enough about it to resort to unusual measures. The Hungarian translation of OpenOffice was going too slowly for Janos Noll, founder of the Hungarian Foundation for Free Software. So he built some web-based tools to distribute the workload and threw a pizza party in the computer room at the Technical University of Budapest. Over a dozen people worked locally, with about 100 Hungarians submitting work remotely over the web. Most of the work—translating over 21,000 text strings—was completed in three days.

Dwayne Bailey of translate.org.za http://translate.org.za/, an open-source translation project based in South Africa, says localising open-source programs into Zulu, Xhosa, Venda, Sesotho and other African languages makes computers more accessible. With translated software, “these languages are suddenly players in the modern world.” Neville Alexander, a former South African freedom-fighter, agrees. “An English-only or even an English-mainly policy necessarily condemns most people, and thus the country as a whole, to a permanent state of mediocrity, since people are unable to be spontaneous, creative and self-confident if they cannot use their first language,” he says.

A similar approach is being taken in India, where there are 18 official languages and over 1,000 regional dialects. Shikha Pillai is one of the leaders of a team in Bangalore that is translating open-source software, including OpenOffice, into ten Indian dialects. She, too, feels that introducing Indian languages will help to foster a far deeper penetration of information technology. “Localisation makes IT accessible to common people,” she says. “And Indian-language enabled software could revolutionise the way our communications work; even the way computers are used in India.”

In May, Thailand's government launched a subsidised “people's PC” that runs LinuxTLE, a Thai-language version of Linux. In September, Japan said it would join a project established by China and South Korea to develop localised, open-source alternatives to Microsoft's software. Computer users around the world are discovering that open-source software speaks their language.