The Inuit language and Ubuntu

[Ryan Thiessen]

On Mon, 2 May 2005, Corey Burger wrote:

> Hey All,
>
> Currently, there is not much support for Inuktitut in any computer
> software. Thus it occured to me that we should remedy this. The plan
> has several facets, some of which are very ambitious.
>
> So here is where we need to go for this to work:
>
> 1. Determine what is already translated and get as much of that into
> Ubuntu as we can. This google search might be a good start:
> http://www.google.ca/search?q=Inuktitut+linux
> 2. Identify key people to help us move forward. This would be mostly
> university people and other translators working in this space.
> 3. Acquire funding to further translation work, with the goal of 100%
> translation. This should primarily from the federal gov.
> 4. Work with Nunavut and NWT local charities to place computers in
> small communities and provide some training.
> 5. Set up a framework to allow the maintenance translation work to continue.
>
> All of this will work within the framework of Ubuntu, without really
> needed to create a deriv.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Corey

This seems like a good task for Rosetta, the Canonical developed tool to 
translate applications into various languages. 
https://launchpad.ubuntu.com/rosetta if you want to check it out.  Right 
now there aren't even many English Canadian translations (though, I'm note 
entirely clear myself how english-ca is different from english-gb). 
Maybe that would be a good project to start with, getting some of the 
Canadian spellings into the various applications in Rosetta, and then we 
would have the required experience to show people how it is done.

A good starter application might be AbiWord, since that is a good 
user-focused application that can be used on windows and Ubuntu, and it's 
also in Rosetta.  If we could get AbiWord working completely in Inuktitut, 
we could have something practical to get more Inuktitut speakers excited 
and contributing to a larger Ubuntu translation project.  Does anyone know 
of an Inuktitut speaker who might be willing to work on that translation 
project?

Otherwise, I have no better ideas than Cory -- you could probably get a 
grant from the federal government to do it.  Maybe Inuktitut speakers 
already have some experience with this process, I have no idea how to go 
about that myself.  To be honest I don't even know where to start looking 
for this.

Cheers,
-rt-