Kind Regards,
mercy

I was happy to see that recently a fast Internet cable was made available to the continent, that is currently mostly using very expensive satellite connections for Internet connectivity. And there are most projects delivering additional Internet capacity soon.

As some of the readers of this blog may know, I am heavily involved in the localisation of MediaWiki – as a translator for Dutch, and as a facilitator for all other languages through my work at http://translatewiki.net.

It strikes me that only 33% of the MediaWiki user interface messages (MediaWiki is the software Wikipedia runs on) have been translated into Swahili. This means that if a Swahili speaker uses Wikipedia, he will most likely be confronted with English user interface messages. In my opinion this does not work well for the feeling a user gets when he is using software. Software ‘talks best’ to users in their native language (I assume that is Swahili if users are reading in and working on the Swahili Wikipedia).

I hope for two things, and please let me know if there is some way in which you can help these hopes become reality: that the Swahili localisation of MediaWiki may get a whole lot better in the near future, so that Swahili Wikipedia users may feel (even?) more at home there, and that African languages as a whole get better support in MediaWiki. We have the tools, we are ready to help at translatewiki.net. Are there any people here that can get speakers over there that can makes this happen?!