Project description

The lingua franca of the Pacific Islands (home to a bit over 10 million people) is a language called Pidgin in the Solomon Islands, Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Bislama in Vanuatu. They aren't exactly the same, but they are all mutually intelligible and lots of people can code switch between them.

Computers and computing infrastructure is quite prevalent in the Pacific Islands, but it is often seen as a "white people" thing, partly because everything is set up in English, which isn't surprising, since no software of any kind has been localised into this language group. People are genuinely surprised to hear that it is even possible. It's just assumed that you have to be fluent in English before you can start using a computer.

We'd like to address that. We could do a translation of the Facebook user interface which would impact a larger audience, but that's problematic. We would rather localise something that would open up white collar and professional jobs to people with poorer English-language skills. Hence localising LibreOffice.

LibreOffice is an open source equivalent of the Microsoft Office suite. So there should be trailing benefits from this project where an increase in the usage of LibreOffice means that less money goes to Redmond from these developing nations, and more gets recycled locally. But the actual impact certificate is the right to say "we funded the first digital localisation project in the Pacific Islands" and should be evaluated in terms of the percentage of the message catalogs that have been translated.

What is your track record on similar projects?

Our team consists of a lecturer (me) in computer science (in Australia), and two university-educated native Tok Pisin speakers in PNG. From my previous history in industry I have reasonable contacts in Vanuatu and the Solomons as well. We ran a small trial ($1000) at the start of 2022 to make sure that we had all the technical skills we needed.

How will you spend your funding?

Donations will fund the salaries of two native speakers to work on the translations. We don't need money for computers at this stage. Tok Pisin is written in an unextended Latin alphabet (i.e. you can just use ascii) so there's no need for font development or any custom code development.