Interviewing Dwayne from translate.org.za in our latest podcast was a real inspiration. Despite his quiet manner, Dwayne's passion for language, his desire to help protect indigenous languages and provide greater accessibility to the benefits of information technology for affected communities comes through forcibly.

As a developer I admit that I am often guilty of  leaving internationalisation as an option when developing applications, especially when budgets and time are tight. Dwayne provides some great tips for developers when it comes to making  applications easier to translates. Clearly there is a whole host of issues around natural language that developers need to be sensitised too. Dwayne mentioned in the interview that he wants to organise a course on internationalisation for developers. I think I will follow up on that with him!

Translate.org.za is responsible for the translation of applications such as open office, thunderbird and firefox into Zulu, Xhosa and SA English. There is even a South African keyboard available! Transalte.org.za is also behind the development of pootle an online translation management tool.

Download episode 26 here!

As a side note, we had mentioned about lost cell phones around the world and here is the article which Darlene referenced during the interview.