African languages in a digital age : challenges and opportunities for indigenous language computing / Don Osborn.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 139-145) and index.

1. Introduction. -- 2. Background. Importance of African languages and implications for ICT. What is localisation? Overlapping regional contexts: localisation where? Who localises? What is the current state of localisation across the African region? -- 3. Introducing 'localisation ecology.' An ecological perspective on the environment for localisation. The PLETES model. Dynamic complexes within localisation ecology. Relevance to questions of ICT and localisation -- 4. Linguistic context. Languages, dialects and linguistic geography. Sociolinguistics and language change. Oral and literate traditions. Language and language in education policies. Basic literacy, pluriliteracy and user skills. Terminology and accommodation of ICT concepts -- 5. Technical context I: physical access. Physical and soft access. Computer hardware and operating systems. Connectivity and ICT policy -- 6. Technical context II: internationalisation. The facilitating technical environment. Handling complex scripts: from ASCII to Unicode. The 'last mile' of internationalisation. Internationalisation and localisation -- 7. African-language texts, encoding and fonts. Non-Latin scripts and ICT. Typology of Latin-based African orthographies. Evolution of African-language text use in ICT. Fonts. -- 8. Keyboards and input systems. Keyboards. Keyboards for Africa. Alternative input methods -- 9. Defining languages in ICT: tags and locales. Languages and the ISO 639 standards. Locale data -- 10. Internet. E-mail. Internationalisation and the web. Web content in and about African languages. Internationalised domain names -- 11. Software localisation. Applications and operating systems. Trends in proprietary software. Trends in free and open-source software. Software localisation in Africa. Web interfaces -- 12. Mobile technology and other specialised applications. Mobile technology. Audio dimensions: voice, text-to-speech and speech recognition. Computer assisted translation -- 13. Achieving sustainable localisation. Needs by kind of localisation and localiser. Understanding the needs of localisers. Analysis of needs from a pan-African perspective. Facilitating communication about localisation -- 14. Summary, recommendations and conclusion. Major themes. Strategic perspective. Conferences and workshops. Training and public education on localisation. Information resources and networking. Languages, policy and planning. Basic localisation and ICT policies and programmes. Africa and ICT standards for localisation. Advanced applications, tools and research. Conclusion.

With increasing numbers of computers and penetration of the Internet around the world, localization of the technology and the content it carries into the many languages people speak is becoming an ever more important area for discussion and action. Localization, simply put, includes translation and cultural adaptation of user interfaces and software applications, as well as creation and translation of internet content in diverse languages. It is essential in making information and communication technology more accessible to the populations of the poorer countries, increasing its relevance to t.

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