My Africa Today

Swahili (or KiSwahili as it is known in Swahili) is the most widely spoken African language, as a first or additional language. As a consequence it is receiving some of the most attention with relation to use in information and communication technologies (ICTs).

This message is set up to facilitate communication about various technical initiatives, projects, and research. For the moment it will serve as an experiment to see if this format can serve as an easily accessible place for exchange of information on and links to research and projects for advanced computer applications in Swahili. These include:

• Online dictionaries like Kamusi
• Machine translation (MT) - computer programs for automatic translation into and out of Swahili
• Translation memory - computer programs that assist translators but are not the same as MT
• Geographic information systems (GIS)
• Text-to-speech (TTS) programs
• Speech recognition / speech-to-text (STT) programs
• Various WWW, "Web 2.0" & "semantic web" applications
• Programming in Swahili
• Other cutting edge ICTs

Part of the reason for setting this up is that I receive some information about Swahili language activities that is interesting and useful but does not always fit the format of other webpages such as those on Bisharat.net or the new PanAfrican Localisation (PAL) project site.

This forum is not intended to replace existing forums for discussion of Swahili language such as

• H-Swahili http://www.h-net.org/~swahili/
• Kamusi Project Swahili Online Forum http://research.yale.edu/swahili/learn/?q=forum
• Kiswahili http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Kiswahili/

Those interested in learning Swahili or disussing Swahili topics are suggested to use those lists.

Hopefully this message board - the latest in a group of others accessible via http://www.quicktopic.com/share?s=QSpo - will turn out to be useful and contribute in some way to advance computing in Swahili and other African languages.

Don

Don Osborn, Ph.D. dzo@bisharat.net
*Bisharat! A language, technology & development initiative
*Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - développement
http://www.bisharat.net

*PanAfrican Localisation Project
*Projet panafricain sur la localisation
http://www.PanAfriL10n.org (new site coming)