On this page/Sur cette page... (hide)
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a project intending to provide education for all children using small laptop computers. The project was begun at the MIT Media Lab under the leadership of Nicholas Negroponte, and continues in a separate non-profit. Mary Lou Jepsen, lead technologist for OLPC, has started her own company, Pixel Qi, to commercialize her screen technology and to develop a $75 laptop for distribution through OLPC.
The OLPC laptop is formally called the "XO" and often referred to as the "$100 laptop" since that was the original design goal. The current manufacturing cost is $188. Since it is intended for distribution in many countries of the world, multilingual support and localised interfaces and content are important facets of the OLPC project. The Wiki is also translated into several languages.
Website: http://laptop.org/
Wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/
Wiki pages with language support information include Countries, Languages, Keyboards, Input Methods (including SCIM, Smart Common Input Method), Fonts, Localization, and pages for OLPC groups in many countries. The Category:Countries page lists country-specific pages including Nigeria, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Libya, Benin, and others in Africa. Category:Languages (international) lists pages for particular languages.
Note that the project is taking account of several African languages:
Localization site: http://dev.laptop.org/translate
Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Aymara, Basque, Bengali, Bengali (India), Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, Dzongkha, English, English (South African), English (US), Finnish, French, Friulian, Fula, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hindi, Icelandic, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Macedonian, Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Punjabi, Quechua, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovenian, Sotho, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Wolof, Yoruba
Since OLPC plans to introduce laptops into several countries, issues of localised content and interfaces arise. The XO is fully Unicode-enabled, including keyboard layouts, fonts, and other requirements. Amharic, which has a syllabic script, is supported using a SCIM IME. There are keyboard layouts and SCIM IMEs included on the XO for all modern writing systems except Mongolian. For the main languages of countries receiving the laptops, the keyboard files have been modified to handle the XO keyboard's key arrangement. Dvorak keyboards are provided for several languages, and also the left-handed and right-handed Dvorak keyboards. These one-handed keyboards are important for amputees, and also useful for those wtho like to type with one hand and mouse with the other. Languages of Nigeria and neighboring countries of West Africa whose orthographies include extended characters are fully supported. XOs made for students speaking a language other than English will have a keyboard layout switching key, and keytops printed in the local writing system and Latin alphabet.
Discussions are ongoing as of 2007/11 and can be accessed here:
(revised version, based on a design proposed several years ago by SIL)
OLPC is using Pootle to localise the interface for the XO laptop. See the localisation work page at: http://dev.laptop.org/translate
See also:
OLPC runs several mailing lists indexed at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/ . Some of those with specific relevance to localisation and/or Africa are:
< OIF | Organisations (InterAfrican & International) | PAN L10n >
