OLPC Localization With One Laptop Per Greek Child

19 Feb 2007

All Greek OLPC to me

Last fall, did you head the call for Volunteers for a low-cost Greek laptop by the OLPC Greek Development Team to start localizing One Laptop Per Greek Child?

Volunteers with the time and disposition to get involved in localising the low-cost laptop for school pupils for the Greek market, currently being developed by the international non-profit organisation "One Laptop per Child (OLPC)" on the initiative of the founder of the MIT Media Lab, Prof. N. Negroponte, are being sought by [the Secretariat for the Information Society] to localise the computer for the Greek market.

From that call, did you join the [email protected] mailing list? If so, you could've been helping the likes of Simos Xenitellis in his efforts to localize the OLPC XO into Greek.

Then you may have been lucky enough to attend the presentation of the Children's Machine XO at Makedonia University in person, instead of watching it via YouTube video:

Yeah, its all Greek to me too, but that's just the point. Localization is going to be a major challenge for OLPC as English is not the first language of the majority of the world's populace. Or as Jim Gettys points out:

With Libya, Nigeria, and Rwanda on board, we minimally have to have support for Arabic, English, Yoruba, Hausa, Kinyarwanda, and probably Kiswahili (Swahili), which is commonly spoken as a second language among > 30 million people in east Africa according to Ethnologue. Kinyarwanda and Kiswahili appear to be the most challenging at the moment.

At least one country we are talking to has at least 11 languages of > 1 million speakers, some with more than 10 million speakers.

So, learned speakers of the world's languages, its time to help localize OLPC. The list is long and the time is short.

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3 Comments

Take a look at this:
http://www.cubaperiodistas.cu/noticias/febrero07/16/03.htm
(It's in spanish, btw)
but spares a few questions,
is it really "blocked" the sugar OS in the XO? (Because, argentinian organization UTUTO, has another linux-based operative system. It migh not be superb, but it's our own, we can make it better)

Besides, says that XO machines codl be located and deactivated by MIT.
Is it possible?

Cid | February 20, 2007 9:29 AM |

(Score: 0)

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/wixi may be useful tool for localization w/ OLPC.. the idea is a wiki for language learners.. WiXi formats "twext" text proposed on last (and this) year's OLPC Google Summer of Code page..

wixi/twexter ain't rocket science.. it's a simple interface and tool to format "bifocal bitext" for language learners, serving between many language pairs.. when it works, it may help provide current translation and minority language data for a *real* project:

http://omegawiki.org *is* rocket science: all languages in one database.. nature.com has a $30 article about OmegaWiki, so it must be real =).. OmegaWiki reportedly won an OLPC Google Summer of Code grant in 2006 and is currently providing the OLPC with multilingual dictionary content..

Gerard Meijssen told me he's considering WiXi as an optional front-end for OmegaWiki.. so this year, wixi/twexter may find the mentor and computer science student to win the OLPC Google Summer of Code 2007 grant and hack the WiXi front end.. then kids might get a multilingual wiki that both localizes and globalizes..

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Google_Summer_of_Code#twexter_language_learning_interface
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7129/full/445691a.html
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Google_Summer_of_Code#One_dictionary_per_child
http://omegawiki.blogspot.com
http://code.google.com/soc

duke | February 20, 2007 2:31 PM |

(Score: 0)

HI
I AM IN ATHENS.
HOW I CAN BUY ONE 100 EURO LAPTOP?
THANKS

NIKO KARAYAN | October 10, 2007 12:10 AM |

(Score: 0)

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