Mozilla is a global community of people that are passionate about the open web. The foundation and the community around it are well known for giving us what you probably could be using to read this post – the Firefox open-source web browser.
Firefox is a sensational project born out of the desire for a fast and open web at a time when Microsoft with internet explorer held the master key to web( and bullied everyone). Today, Firefox is one of the most used web browsers world over. More so, it ushers in a whole lot of innovation in making the web fast and accessible to everyone on the planet.
Localizing Firefox: Firefox now in Acholi and Luganda
Join the Mozilla Uganda community
“Mobilizing” Firefox
Creating local translation tools and dictionaries
I also spoke to San about the need to not just translate the Software, but also the real content that web visitors view when they open a web page like say Wikipedia. Already there’re automatic translation tools like Google’s Google translator product that translates a whole web page with just a click of button. However, this is limited to specific languages none of which includes local languages spoken here(with the exception of Swahili).
The translation of local languages would require some inter-lingual dictionaries and some Artificial Intelligence to pull off a local “Google translator” version. According to San, they’ve created a Luganda Glossary but also, he says “there’s content that needs to be translated and another that needs to be created” – implying that creation of local content could be more feasible than translating already existing web content into local languages.
