Greenman reviews African language wikimedia contributions and how far they’ve come since May…

Afrikaans remains the largest African language Wikipedia (and 79th largest overall), remaining comfortably ahead of Swahili. At 2007’s growth rate, Swahili looked likely to pass Afrikaans this year, but 2008 has seen new momentum for Afrikaans. Yoruba though has seen rapid growth, and [...]

Back to the Future! DotSub subtitles web video in multiple languages, Blueworld gets a make over, Yahoo launches Mail Apps, and YouTube faces competitive threat.
[M4A | MP3 | Subscribe | iTunes | YouTube | Zoopy]

LINKS FROM THE SHOW
Who Will Perserve Your Digital Data?
Yahoo To Launch Mail App Platform
DotSub: Any Video, Any Language
BlueWorld’s Redesign
YouTube
Hulu

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In preparation for Barcamp Africa I’ve collected a list of words and phrases that I think will define African tech in 2009. They’re definitely words to watch out for at Barcamp Africa! Some of it I’ve heard in use, others I made up:
2009 Buzzwords
bushcode - code that may not be the right way [...]

In August, students at Makerere University made international news headlines when they undertook the ambitious project of translating Mozilla’s Firefox web browser from English into the local Ugandan language of Luganda. At Campala2008 I had the pleasure of meeting Olweny San James, one of the student developers who participated in the Luganda-Firefox translation. [...]

Earlier this year Don Osborn blogged about his tour of the to new National Museum of Language in Washington, D.C….
I had the opportunity yesterday (April 29) to visit the National Museum of Language (NML) in College Park, Maryland (U.S.) by invitation for a special preview day. The museum opens to the public formally on Saturday, [...]

I grew up in the United States where I spent many days locked in my bedroom with stacks of comic books both contemporary and old. Since moving to Uganda, I’ve found a new appreciation for comic books as a tool to encourage reading and to promote literacy.

At the time I read all kinds [...]

I’ve written quite a few posts on Appfrica in the past on computational linguistics and the potential for using the local languages of African users. Because literacy and multi-lingualism tend to be huge problems in African regions where education standards are poor, using local languages would potentially be a way to increase computer use [...]

I profiled the Kamusi Project last week but failed to mention that they recently met with the developers of another ‘living dictionary’, PLADO (the Pan-African Living Dictionary Online), to discuss building on the Kamusi architecture to create an interlinked multilingual dictionary for African languages.

The Kamusi Project (www.kamusiproject.org) is pleased to announce that
we are about to [...]

You may have noticed that there’s some been some changes to the site over the past few days. I’d like to welcome the two new African lifestyle blogs 1°North and Helene in Rwanda to our Blog Network. They join this blog (appfrica.net) and GosDot in offering a different perspective on life, technology and [...]

What African language is spoken by one out of every 60 people on earth? Swahili. The Kamusi Project function is to help that number grow with their collaborative database/dictionary: Kamusi.