Message from Sabine Emmy Eller s.eller@voxhumanitatis.org

Dear translators,

First of all: thanks to all who wrote me about issues and problems and for
any other reason. Some of these points are mentioned in this mail. Since it
is difficult and also lengthy to mention each single name, please let me say
"A huge thank you to all those who contribute!"

There are quite some news and changes because now it is some time that I did
not send out a general e-mail.

The number of languages we are now working on is 27. 5 of these are not
published since the material or needs proof reading or is really just some
words.

To our new members: welcome in the team :-)

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Contents:
1) What you can work on
2) Data for KHangMan and Kanagram
3) A conversion script helping our work to be published
4) Co-operation with openSUSE Education and KDE Eduaction
5) African languages - a podcast with Martin Benjamin and Kevin Scannell
6) Questions/Answers/Notes on the translation work
7) Co-operation request for free educational a card-game"Rakonto"
8) A quote :-) and the end of this Newsletter

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1) What you can work on:

I added further terminology and all that is new was sorted alphabetically.
All that is marked nawaro is originally a project by Wikipedia where the
project owner gave us a list of terminology. This is the part I myself will
work on as much as possible, since it is the most difficult part of this
terminology.

Columns for the categories in other languages than English are added right
now - as for the reason why it is needed see below.

Some notes on questions and problems we had at the end of this e-mail
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2) The first data for KHangMan and Kanagram was created in Joola Fonyi (a
language of senegal) and Inari Saami (a language of Finland) just as a test:
it works fine. Outi will write an article about that soon. this means that
now we work on a data converter from our tables to the needed formats.

3) I received a data conversion script for Parley which I extended so that
it now works for all 22 languages. This means potentially we can create
21x21 language training files. I am not able to handle such an amount of
files and change requests that will come in and therefore I will now
concentrate on vocabulary trainers starting from the following languages:
English, German, Italian, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Finnish.
Should you wish an export of any other language that is present: please let
me know. This script allows also for lesson creation provided that we have
categories. I started to add them in the English file (please do not add any
categories to the English part you see in your workfile. If you wish to make
additions/changes, please let me know so that I give you access to the main
file for English - actually I really would like some help there so that I
can concentrate on the conversion and nawaro data).

This script can also create lessons within Parley. This means when one
chooses to learn vocabulary one can choose to just to the animals, food,
crops, trees or whatever. I started to add categories to the English part
and I am now adding additional columns to the various files so that the
categories can be translated/integrated which will make the data more
accessible.

4) We had some online mini-conferences and the decision was taken that
openSUSE Education, KDE Education and Vox Humanitatis work together to
create a free distro containing free software and contents for Education.
Further info in this Article:
http://www.voxhumanitatis.org/content/when-three-educational-projects-ge...

5) Martin Benjamin (Kamusi Project) and Kevin Scannell (An Gramadòir) talked
with Bèrto ëd Sèra about African languages. Approx. 25 mins of audio can be
listened in the podcast section for who is interested:
http://www.voxhumanitatis.org/content/martin-benjamin-and-kevin-scannell...

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6) Questions/Answers/Notes on the translation work:

Please check line 122 - Please read as example sentence "Out of a fount you
can get water." - this term was translated in various ways, so if we create
a inter-language-combination we will get in trouble.

Please check line 404 and eventually change according to the example
sentence: "In this case we will build the house."

Please check line 459 - opener was substituted with "can opener", because
just opener was translated in various ways. The other meanings of opener
will be added in a second stage.

Line 1945 "moog" - the question was: is this really a musical instrument or
some kind of brand? - Outi: could you please answer here?

You will find two colums in English deleted which right now are not needed:
the categories are more relevant. It is easier to work without them. They
will be re-inserted once the categories are almost complete.

Syllabication: we decided that we are going to use "=" as separator since
"-" can be problematic for some languages. This will change during the next
days and this is just to tell you so that you are not astonished when you
see this change.

Search/replace: please don't use search/replace on the online documents. We
had loads of trouble because of somebody doing it. Thanks to all the
colleagues who helped to get it right again.

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7) Co-operation request for free educational a card-game"Rakonto". It is
about 16 easy sentences to translate:

I
mother
father
parents
grandmother
grandfather
grandparents
women
men
Grandfather is a great story teller.
Father and Grandmother have both brown eyes.
Mother sings a song.
I love my brothers and sisters.
Grandmother pampers all her grandchildren.
Mother and Grandfather like to sing.
Father comes home.

Please add them as comment here:
http://www.voxhumanitatis.org/project/RakontoCardGame
(this is also where you find a more detailed description and links).
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For now I wish to stop here. I hope you all will remain in the team.

There is what we repeat over and over again "Each word counts" and a nice
quote: "Never doubt that a small group of thought ful people can change the
world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has. (Margaret Mead)".

Well, you already did some change :-) it sound's strange, doesn't it? Well,
but really: each piece more of free education we get, and if it is just a
very tiny one, is part of a big puzzle. Or maybe you could compare it with a
drop ... and many drops for the oceans :-)

Thanks for taking the time. I know this is a lot - that's why I called it a
newsletter.

Cheers, Sabine