The ANLoc* locales project just announced that the Hausa locale for Nigeria is complete. Hausa for Niger is apparently already complete. See http://www.it46.se/afrigen/statistics.php (which has summaries of work on many languages). This project is being coordinated by Martin Benjamin.

Locales are files of data for computers and software to adapt presentations for different language preferences. They are generally defined by language and country.

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

* http://www.africanlocalisation.net/

Siebrand Mazeland is asking for help translating Mediawiki* into Hausa. Mediawiki is the software used for Wikipedia, as well as being available for free to anyone wanting to set up a wiki on a website. Having it available in Hausa (as well as other African languages) would help make it more useful to Hausaphones (etc.).

See http://translatewiki.net/wiki/User_talk:Siebrand where you can add a message indicating your interest in helping. You can also post here.

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/

For background to /m130 re last year's proposal to close Hausa Wikipedia, see http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/afrophonewikis/message/454

FYI from the Hausa Online blog at http://hausaonline.wordpress.com/2009/07/2...kipedia-is-growing/ :

Hausa Wikipedia is growing

Posted by hausaonline on Wednesday, July 22, 2009

About a year ago, I warned in a blog post that Hausa Wikipedia [ http://ha.wikipedia.org/ ] could soon be closed, due to lack of activity. I don’t know whether it was because of this post or due to some other factors, but since then, Hausa wikipedia is growing fast. Have a look, and maybe you feel like contributing something yourself or editing (please, don’t vandalize!) the articles that have been written.

If you would like to contribute something, but don’t know how this works, here are some guidelines [see the blog posting for links]:
* Contributing to Wikipedia
* Policies and guidelines
* Tutorial

You could start with some topic you are familiar with or translate an article from another language.

A good point to start from could be some online news articles. Some old Hausa school books like "Ikon Allah" would be good source material, too. But make sure you do not just copy what is written there, in order to avoid copyright issues.

I received a request for Unicode text of African languages written in Latin script with extended characters. The purpose is testing some new fonts. Does anyone have access to such digital text of Hausa?

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

Edited by author 06-12-2009 11:31 AM
Excerpt from a message posted by Manuela Noske on A12n-collaboration:

FYI that Microsoft Corporation has released the Windows Vista Language Interface Packs for Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba on June 2nd. The LIPs are available at the locations below. They are free downloads that install on any PC that runs Windows Vista with either SP1 or SP2.

Hausa Details Page and .mlc: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...7f5b&displaylang=ha

http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/A.../LIP_ha-Latn-NG.mlc

...

(See also /m126 on this message board.)

Edited by author 05-18-2009 10:28 PM
The Google web search engine now has a Hausa interface. See http://www.google.com/intl/ha/ . It appears to be in an ASCIIfied version of the Boko orthography.

(Not sure if this is related to the effort mentioned in /m111 )

Microsoft's Local Language Program is working to localize Windows Vista in Hausa.

See this story on 'Gbenga Sesan's Oro blog:
"Vista, MS Office in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba"
Friday, December 12th, 2008
http://www.gbengasesan.com/blog/?p=307

The translation of terminology in Hausa is available for review at:
http://www.pinigeria.org/microsoft/hausaglossary.pdf

You can check out more information about Windows Vista Language Support in Hausa and other languages at:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/vista/V...nguage_Support.mspx

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

The "Hausa Online" blog has a posting on using the abcTajpu extension in Firefox to be able to type the hooked letters. See: http://hausaonline.wordpress.com/2008/06/2...d-letters-in-hausa/

A reply to a blog posting I wrote on machine translation (MT) at http://donosborn.org/blog/2008/06/30/parad...achine-translation/ mentioned that "Language Weaver (MT company) has a Hausa-English engine..." I have been trying to track down information on that, and any help would be of interest.

I did find a notice from Language Weaver last September that I was unaware of (in an old ad on http://www.translationdirectory.com/transl...ranslation_jobs.php , where they did not delete the it as requested since the job is over):

Source language: Hausa
Target language: English

Details of the project: 100,000 words of articles in Hausa from international news sources (BBC World Svc, Deutsche Welle, VOA, etc) as well as national news sites (Gaskiya, Nigerian Newsday.) We are willing to divide the job over several translators if you want to do only a portion of the work.

We will pay 10 cents per source word. Deadline for completed translation: Oct 11.

We need a simple, direct translation without localization. The results will be used as a reference for testing the performance of an automated translation system.

Special requirements to the applicants: To determine the quality of your work, we will provide a 9-sentences sample article for you to translate and return to us.

Deadline for applying: 9/21/07

Delete this ad from the site soon after the deadline for applying

Barbara Blankenship
Language Weaver, Inc
USA

Language Weaver's site is http://www.languageweaver.com

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net

The One Laptop Per Child project (see /m96 & /m115) has a page for people who want to work on localization at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle#Sign-up . For languages like Hausa not yet in the table, it looks like you will have to add appropriate rows in order to enter your name.

Note link to their page on Hausa.

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net
PanAfriL10n.org