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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    [kde-promo] Vox Humanitatis Interview
From:       Roland Wolters <roland.wolters () credativ ! de>
Date:       2009-12-04 12:25:12
Message-ID: 200912041325.12621.roland.wolters () credativ ! de
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Hej there,

it took quite a long time, but now I finished the interview with Sabine from 
Vox Humanitatis. The main problem was that Sabine (thankfully) provided me so 
many information which really made it very hard to shorten the interview!

@Sabine, I had to cut the interview almost by factor 2 to make it as short as 
most of the other long articles on news.kde.or - I am sorry for that, but 
believe me, it was all but easy to do that :/ Please re-read the article and 
check if everything is alright for you!

@Promo: I checked with other interviews and tried to be at least close to the 
length of these. Too long articles are hard to read and might scare readers 
away.
There is howver something special with this interview: it contains an 
"attachment", a letter with futher explanations which I would like to not 
include, but display on a dedicated web page. Is that possible?

And now, I am open for comments :)

Regards,

Roland
-- 
Roland Wolters
Tel.: +49 (0) 21 61 / 46 43-181
Mobil: +49 (0) 160 / 74 52 624
pgp fingerprint: D2DE 4612 9C7D 7B7A 420D 84A8 E900 29F9 C16C 2283

credativ GmbH, HRB Mönchengladbach 12080 
Hohenzollernstr. 133, 41061 Mönchengladbach 
Geschäftsführung: Dr. Michael Meskes, Jörg Folz

["NewsKDEInterview.txt" (text/plain)]

Using KDE to empower cultural diversity - an interview with Vox Humanitatis

Among the broad amount of software offered by the KDE Software Compilation is <a \
href="http://edu.kde.org/parley/">Parley</a>, a tool often used for vocabulary \
training. Recently the people from Vox Humanitatis, a project dealing with less \
resourced cultures, came in provided a set of vocabulary data files for Parley for \
less known languages. That was the point were we got interested in the project, and \
asked for an interview with Sabine Emmy Eller, CCO of Vox Humanitatis.

== Tell us a bit about yourself as a person.

Well in real life I am a translator and consultant for language and international \
marketing. Since 1994 I have been working as a freelance translator mainly in the \
technical, hardware and software localisation sectors. The firstt contact with Open \
Source took place around 2001, and from 2004 on I am actively involved in projects of \
the Wikimedia Foundation. My focus moved to less resourced cultures in 2005 which in \
the end led to the creation of  Vox Humanitatis working with Bèrto ëd Sèra. Today \
I am in charge of communication as CCO of Vox Humanitatis.

== What is Vox Humanitatis, what are your main goals?

Vox Humanitatis is a not for profit organisation that cares about less resourced \
cultures. We are focused on developing opportunities for less resourced cultures, so \
that they can be perceived by their native bearers as an element of dignity and an \
opportunity for social promotion.

Starting from maintaining the culture by creating contents in the various languages \
and localizing software we establish a "virtuous circle": we reinforce cultural \
diversity, while at the same time spreading "knowledge about the other" and tolerance \
among different native communities. This even includes communities which do not not \
have an ethnic base, like sign-language communities and the likes.

Of course one main point of our activities is helping education for and within less \
resourced cultures taking their usage back into everyday business and to allow for a \
better approach to education in many countries of the world.

Further info can be found on <a \
href="http://www.voxhumanitatis.org">voxhumanitatis.org</a> and in the <a \
href="http://www.voxhumanitatis.org/content/scope-and-practical-goals">Scope and \
Goals</a> section on that site.

== How do people join Vox Humanitatis?

Good question ... there are many ways and all depends from the languages you work on. \
We have professional translators who help with the translation of terminology for the \
mayor languages, but also students who do the easier work. Languages like Udmurt, \
Inari Saami etc. are mainly worked on by language enthusiasts that try to keep these \
languages alive. Partly they are mother tongue speakers, partly just enthusiasts. \
There is so much to do :-) Currently we need help from people who could do the \
conversion work from the tables to kvtml, simply because this would mean that I don't \
have to care about it and can care more about searching for new team members that can \
help with some of the 7000 languages in the world.

And yes, the work for Vox Humanitatis takes time, but when you then see the first \
educational material for a language that has approx. 400 speakers, that is something \
particular :-)


== What do you do with Parley?

Parley right now is being used for vocabulary training, syllabification training and \
mathematics (multiplication). It is still not well known, but within our organisation \
people use it on KDE, Gnome and Windows XP without having trouble. The first \
"testers" are my kids who have laptops with edubuntu 9.04. They are in third class \
primary school and many ideas on what to do with Parley come from their needs at \
school. 

In the background , the actual data is stored in google Spreadsheet, in a second \
stage the data is going to be maintained with <a \
href="http://www.voxhumanitatis.org/content/ambaradan-owm2-storage-engine">Ambaradan</a> \
which will allow for much easier handling and data preparation.

Parley can and shall be used from primary school level to university level. Of course \
the available lessons will grow step by step and I hope we will have Ambaradan there \
soon, since it will help a lot when it comes to structuring the data for specific \
lessons (schools etc., depending on the books they use need the data structured in \
different ways). Right now it is simply too much work to get this done properly and \
therefore we concentrate on just integrating terminology and translating it in as \
many languages as possible.

By the way, much of the contents created can also be used for KHangman. It is \
relevant for us that whatever we do serves for more than "just one kind of exercise". \
Not all languages have many volunteers. For example, look at <a \
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inari_Sami">Inari Saami</a> which has only 400 \
speakers (in 2001) - and we are getting contents for this language right now. Parley \
is perfect for this, because we can "just create the study data" since the user \
interface is separated from the data. So: first let people learn their mother tongue \
and then we can go ahead localising software hopefully already having then a team of \
people ready!


== You said that Parley is used on Windows as well - is the cross-desktop nature of \
Parley important for your use case?

Actually, it is important for KDE and Linux as a whole. Most people see Linux and \
whatever is connected to it as some kind of magic that is hard to understand, they \
are afraid of an OS-change. But when they use for example Parley or also KHangMan, \
they don't even know that they deal with something connected with Linux. When they \
later find out themselves what the relations are they are astonished and realize that \
there is nothing strange, so opening a door to Open Source in general.


== What exactly is Ambaradan, and how do you use it together with Parley?

<a href=http://www.voxhumanitatis.org/content/ambaradan-owm2-storage-engine">Ambaradan</a> \
is aimed to be a multilingua dictionary and a data storage engine. It is still in \
early development and needs a bit more work before we bring it to the masses. When it \
comes to Parley adding the data there has various advantages: we can collaboratively \
edit the data without the need to care about various tables like we have it now. The \
same data can easily be combined with further present data in order to form further \
contents. And once we have our version 1.0 out: people can work even offline thanks \
to the data distribution scheme.


== What is the status of KDE in your language - are the translations good? How does \
it compare to (proprietary/free) alternatives? Does KDE pay enough attention to \
languages other than English?

There I have a problem to answer with my very own experience. Being German: all is \
quite fine. Other languages than the big ones: well you give people the possibility \
to localize into their languages and therefore it is a matter of doing it. This is \
often a problem. I'll attached a text I wrote the other day about "Localization the \
other way round" at the end which highlights the problem.

Technically speaking, the hugest problems for small/rare languages wishing to join \
the Linux train is not KDE, but rather X and the cryptic procedure needed to "add a \
language to Linux" (compare to a few minutes to make a new keyboard layout for \
Microsoft). This is where the real common bottlenecks are.

== How popular/important is KDE/Free Software in your country, how important is it \
inside Vox Humanitatis?

For Vox Humanitatis Free Software in general is very relevant. KDE turned out to be \
our personal favourite, but we are not limted to it. Without free software and free \
content we could not do what we are doing. For many countries in the world having to \
pay for software and contents is simply not an option. Besides going for free \
computer applications we also look very much at free mobile phone applications. A \
huge share of the market will mainly deal with only that - computers are simply too \
expensive. Also there we have a huge advantage for Parley: the data created for it \
can be used on mobile phones, because there is already an application (<a \
href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/mobvoc/">MobVoc</a>) working with it.


== What are you missing form Parley right now?

There are several points, but I would not ask the question this way: I don't use \
Parley for learning lessons, but to create them. So I look at it in a completely \
different way. We need actual users, students, to get us feedback about real-life \
situations. There is only one thing that IMHO would be great: When you open a lesson \
it should be possible to give instructions on how to deal with it. Since Parley can \
be used also for grammar exercises, mathematics, yes/no questions and answers etc. It \
would be nice to be able to say "To answer these question please type y for yes and n \
for no". Or maybe "to be able to work with this exercises in an efficient way you \
should use the multiple choice option". Of course these instructions can become much \
longer though I would keep them as short as possibile in order to avoid too much text \
to be translated.


== Are you in contact with the deveopers, were you able to share ideas and \
feature-requests?

Yes, we are in touch and we agreed to co-operate as much as possible. Of course we \
share ideas and talk about features that would be nice to see. Everybody really does \
what he/she can to get things on the way.

== Thanks for the interview :)


["NewsKDEInterview-Attachment.txt" (text/plain)]

Localisation the other way round

Localisation in less resourced languages and the very particular scenario we often \
encounter. 

Localisation must be looked at in a very different way when talking about less \
resourced languages. 

Vox Humanitatis deals with cultures and with that also with languages, particular \
ones, those called "less resourced languages". This means there is not much material \
available in these languages. 

During the last years we often had to deal with software localisation in less \
resourced languages. Per se this is great when you have a community where there are \
enough literate people, that is people who know how to write. But what if we deal \
with a language where most people just know the everyday terminology? How can one \
pretend from them to actually first do all the technical background work?

When we do learn our mother languages we first learn very basic words, what is needed \
for everyday life. That is names of food, people, animals, whatever surrounds us and \
we deal with. Then we go to primary school where we learn first concepts that are \
outside of our environment at home. Then middle school, hight school, university, \
work etc. 

Many did not even deal in primary school with their language and now maybe there are \
first steps that the local language is taught in schools again. How should these \
people be able to localise a UI if therminology does not even exist? The computer \
science and software terminology will develop over time and mostly they will be \
leanwords from other languages. 

This means that localisation into less resourced languages needs to be revisited and \
reconsidered in a completely different way. 

Indeed the first step is "schooling". This means that teachers need contents and will \
need to explain modern concepts in the native and local language. Concepts that up to \
now very often were not really considered. So the first words we will find are those \
needeed and not user interfaces. Remeber: also the teacher needs to learn them.

The logical sequence to get whole operating systems in less resourced languages is \
going the other way round: first everyday language contents, then more complex \
terminology used in education and then, when people start to use computers and/or \
mobile phones to learn their language and communicate in their native language, only \
then all these technical terms will come up and only then they will be "truly" coming \
out of the language development. If we do localization of software and user \
interfaces first, of course very much depending on the language, the translator will \
have to invent words for certain activities and/or options.

Of course things are different for less resourced languages where technology and \
computers are already fully integrated in daily life. Where families use them at \
home: there you will already find the needed terms.

Therefore: the first step is primary school and teachers and we are actually working \
on exactly this.

Well, and since I am finishing here, I will do this like all so often: if you have \
some time, also only ten minutes here and there, please consider to jump in and help.


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